Related papers: A Fixed-Point of View on Gradient Methods for Big …
Boosting is a popular way to derive powerful learners from simpler hypothesis classes. Following previous work (Mason et al., 1999; Friedman, 2000) on general boosting frameworks, we analyze gradient-based descent algorithms for boosting…
Online and stochastic gradient methods have emerged as potent tools in large scale optimization with both smooth convex and nonsmooth convex problems from the classes $C^{1,1}(\reals^p)$ and $C^{1,0}(\reals^p)$ respectively. However to our…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been widely used in statistical estimation for large-scale data due to its computational and memory efficiency. While most existing works focus on the convergence of the objective function…
We consider distributed optimization over networks where each agent is associated with a smooth and strongly convex local objective function. We assume that the agents only have access to unbiased estimators of the gradient of their…
Gradient descent and its variants are widely used in machine learning. However, oracle access of gradient may not be available in many applications, limiting the direct use of gradient descent. This paper proposes a method of estimating…
The ability to learn continually without forgetting the past tasks is a desired attribute for artificial learning systems. Existing approaches to enable such learning in artificial neural networks usually rely on network growth, importance…
In this paper, we study two general classes of optimization algorithms for kernel methods with convex loss function and quadratic norm regularization, and analyze their convergence. The first approach, based on fixed-point iterations, is…
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…
The goal of this paper is to promote the use of fixed point strategies in data science by showing that they provide a simplifying and unifying framework to model, analyze, and solve a great variety of problems. They are seen to constitute a…
In this paper, we explore two fundamental first-order algorithms in convex optimization, namely, gradient descent (GD) and proximal gradient method (ProxGD). Our focus is on making these algorithms entirely adaptive by leveraging local…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…
Many statistical $M$-estimators are based on convex optimization problems formed by the combination of a data-dependent loss function with a norm-based regularizer. We analyze the convergence rates of projected gradient and composite…
Data-driven iterative learning control can achieve high performance for systems performing repeating tasks without the need for modeling. The aim of this paper is to develop a fast data-driven method for iterative learning control that is…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
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…
Many supervised learning tasks have intrinsic symmetries, such as translational and rotational symmetry in image classifications. These symmetries can be exploited to enhance performance. We formulate the symmetry constraints into a concise…
In this paper, we present a unified and general framework for analyzing the batch updating approach to nonlinear, high-dimensional optimization. The framework encompasses all the currently used batch updating approaches, and is applicable…
Using backpropagation to compute gradients of objective functions for optimization has remained a mainstay of machine learning. Backpropagation, or reverse-mode differentiation, is a special case within the general family of automatic…
Gradient clipping is a commonly used technique to stabilize the training process of neural networks. A growing body of studies has shown that gradient clipping is a promising technique for dealing with the heavy-tailed behavior that emerged…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…