Related papers: Fast Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient Method w…
Our work focuses on stochastic gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer. Research on this class of problem is quite limited, and until recently no non-asymptotic convergence…
Here we develop variants of SGD (stochastic gradient descent) with an adaptive step size that make use of the sampled loss values. In particular, we focus on solving a finite sum-of-terms problem, also known as empirical risk minimization.…
This paper is concerned with convergence of stochastic gradient algorithms with momentum terms in the nonconvex setting. A class of stochastic momentum methods, including stochastic gradient descent, heavy ball, and Nesterov's accelerated…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
Random Reshuffling (RR), which is a variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) employing sampling without replacement, is an immensely popular method for training supervised machine learning models via empirical risk minimization. Due to…
High order momentum-based parameter update algorithms have seen widespread applications in training machine learning models. Recently, connections with variational approaches have led to the derivation of new learning algorithms with…
We introduce a general method for improving the convergence rate of gradient-based optimizers that is easy to implement and works well in practice. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in a range of optimization problems by…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…
This paper presents a sufficient condition for stochastic gradients not to slow down the convergence of Nesterov's accelerated gradient method. The new condition has the strong-growth condition by Schmidt \& Roux as a special case, and it…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-level compositional optimization, where the objective function is a composition of multiple smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Existing methods for solving this problem…
Stochastic gradient algorithms are often unstable when applied to functions that do not have Lipschitz-continuous and/or bounded gradients. Gradient clipping is a simple and effective technique to stabilize the training process for problems…
The extrapolation strategy raised by Nesterov, which can accelerate the convergence rate of gradient descent methods by orders of magnitude when dealing with smooth convex objective, has led to tremendous success in training machine…
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have achieved human-level performance on a variety of real-world applications. However, the current algorithms still suffer from poor gradient estimation with excessive variance, resulting in…
Gradient descent is slow to converge for ill-conditioned problems and non-convex problems. An important technique for acceleration is step-size adaptation. The first part of this paper contains a detailed review of step-size adaptation…
We present a family of algorithms, called descent algorithms, for optimizing convex and non-convex functions. We also introduce a new first-order algorithm, called rescaled gradient descent (RGD), and show that RGD achieves a faster…
In this paper, we propose a StochAstic Recursive grAdient algoritHm (SARAH), as well as its practical variant SARAH+, as a novel approach to the finite-sum minimization problems. Different from the vanilla SGD and other modern stochastic…
We consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In the context of most machine learning applications, each loss function is non-negative and thus can be expressed as the…
We develop and analyze a new family of {\em nonaccelerated and accelerated loopless variance-reduced methods} for finite sum optimization problems. Our convergence analysis relies on a novel expected smoothness condition which upper bounds…
We propose AdaNAG, an adaptive accelerated gradient method based on Nesterov's accelerated gradient method. AdaNAG is line-search-free, parameter-free, and achieves the accelerated convergence rates $f(x_k) - f_\star =…
We present the remote stochastic gradient (RSG) method, which computes the gradients at configurable remote observation points, in order to improve the convergence rate and suppress gradient noise at the same time for different curvatures.…