Related papers: On variance reduction for stochastic smooth convex…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…
High-probability guarantees in stochastic optimization are often obtained only under strong noise assumptions such as sub-Gaussian tails. We show that such guarantees can also be achieved under the weaker assumption of bounded variance by…
Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…
We present adaptive sequential SAA (sample average approximation) algorithms to solve large-scale two-stage stochastic linear programs. The iterative algorithm framework we propose is organized into \emph{outer} and \emph{inner} iterations…
Stochastic first-order methods such as Stochastic Extragradient (SEG) or Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) for solving smooth minimax problems and, more generally, variational inequality problems (VIP) have been gaining a lot of…
We give nearly matching upper and lower bounds on the oracle complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points ($\| \nabla F(x) \| \leq\epsilon$) in stochastic convex optimization. We jointly analyze the oracle complexity in both the local…
We consider stochastic optimization problems with heavy-tailed noise with structured density. For such problems, we show that it is possible to get faster rates of convergence than $\mathcal{O}(K^{-2(\alpha - 1)/\alpha})$, when the…
First-order methods for stochastic optimization have undeniable relevance, in part due to their pivotal role in machine learning. Variance reduction for these algorithms has become an important research topic. In contrast to common…
This work proposes a universal and adaptive second-order method for minimizing second-order smooth, convex functions. Our algorithm achieves $O(\sigma / \sqrt{T})$ convergence when the oracle feedback is stochastic with variance $\sigma^2$,…
We consider sum-type strongly convex optimization problem (first term) with smooth convex not proximal friendly composite (second term). We show that the complexity of this problem can be split into optimal number of incremental oracle…
We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a key method used in statistical learning. Recently, its non-asymptotic convergence analysis has been considered in many papers. However, most of the prior analyses are made under restrictive assumptions…
We develop two new stochastic Gauss-Newton algorithms for solving a class of non-convex stochastic compositional optimization problems frequently arising in practice. We consider both the expectation and finite-sum settings under standard…
We consider saddle point problems which objective functions are the average of $n$ strongly convex-concave individual components. Recently, researchers exploit variance reduction methods to solve such problems and achieve linear-convergence…
We study nonconvex stochastic optimization under the Blum-Gladyshev ($\mathsf{BG}$-0) noise model, where the stochastic gradient variance grows quadratically with the distance from the initialization. We consider this problem under both…
We consider convex optimization with non-smooth objective function and log-concave sampling with non-smooth potential (negative log density). In particular, we study two specific settings where the convex objective/potential function is…
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…
We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…