Related papers: EE-Grad: Exploration and Exploitation for Cost-Eff…
Selecting an effective step-size is a fundamental challenge in first-order optimization, especially for problems with non-Euclidean geometries. This paper presents a novel adaptive step-size strategy for optimization algorithms that rely on…
We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…
We lower bound the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm at most $\epsilon$) using stochastic first-order methods. In a well-studied model where algorithms access smooth, potentially non-convex functions…
Stochastic gradient methods are central to large-scale learning, but they treat mini-batch gradients as unbiased estimators, which classical decision theory shows are inadmissible in high dimensions. We formulate gradient computation as a…
Choosing the optimization algorithm that performs best on a given machine learning problem is often delicate, and there is no guarantee that current state-of-the-art algorithms will perform well across all tasks. Consequently, the more…
The score function estimator is widely used for estimating gradients of stochastic objectives in stochastic computation graphs (SCG), eg, in reinforcement learning and meta-learning. While deriving the first-order gradient estimators by…
We provide tight upper and lower bounds on the complexity of minimizing the average of $m$ convex functions using gradient and prox oracles of the component functions. We show a significant gap between the complexity of deterministic vs…
We develop new stochastic gradient methods for efficiently solving sparse linear regression in a partial attribute observation setting, where learners are only allowed to observe a fixed number of actively chosen attributes per example at…
Understanding and analyzing markets is crucial, yet analytical equilibrium solutions remain largely infeasible. Recent breakthroughs in equilibrium computation rely on zeroth-order policy gradient estimation. These approaches commonly…
Practical results have shown that deep learning optimizers using small constant learning rates, hyperparameters close to one, and large batch sizes can find the model parameters of deep neural networks that minimize the loss functions. We…
Training large neural networks requires distributing learning across multiple workers, where the cost of communicating gradients can be a significant bottleneck. signSGD alleviates this problem by transmitting just the sign of each…
We consider the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm driven by a general stochastic sequence, including i.i.d noise and random walk on an arbitrary graph, among others; and analyze it in the asymptotic sense. Specifically, we employ…
In modern decentralized applications, ensuring communication efficiency and privacy for the users are the key challenges. In order to train machine-learning models, the algorithm has to communicate to the data center and sample data for its…
Simplex gradients are an essential feature of many derivative free optimization algorithms, and can be employed, for example, as part of the process of defining a direction of search, or as part of a termination criterion. The calculation…
This paper develops coding techniques to reduce the running time of distributed learning tasks. It characterizes the fundamental tradeoff to compute gradients (and more generally vector summations) in terms of three parameters: computation…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has played a central role in machine learning. However, it requires a carefully hand-picked stepsize for fast convergence, which is notoriously tedious and time-consuming to tune. Over the last several…
Multi-objective optimization is central to many engineering and machine learning applications, where multiple objectives must be optimized in balance. While multi-gradient based optimization methods combine these objectives in each step,…
Modern deep neural network training is typically based on mini-batch stochastic gradient optimization. While the use of large mini-batches increases the available computational parallelism, small batch training has been shown to provide…
The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…