Related papers: Acceleration and Averaging in Stochastic Mirror De…
Dual averaging-type methods are widely used in industrial machine learning applications due to their ability to promoting solution structure (e.g., sparsity) efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel accelerated dual-averaging…
The paper is devoted to a special Mirror Descent algorithm for problems of convex minimization with functional constraints. The objective function may not satisfy the Lipschitz condition, but it must necessarily have the Lipshitz-continuous…
We study the problem of estimating low-rank matrices from linear measurements (a.k.a., matrix sensing) through nonconvex optimization. We propose an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve a nonconvex…
Asynchronous algorithms have attracted much attention recently due to the crucial demands on solving large-scale optimization problems. However, the accelerated versions of asynchronous algorithms are rarely studied. In this paper, we…
We deal with the problem of gradient estimation for stochastic differentiable relaxations of algorithms, operators, simulators, and other non-differentiable functions. Stochastic smoothing conventionally perturbs the input of a…
We consider unconstrained minimization of smooth convex functions. We propose a novel variational perspective using forced Euler-Lagrange equation that allows for studying high-resolution ODEs. Through this, we obtain a faster convergence…
We introduce and analyze a new family of first-order optimization algorithms which generalizes and unifies both mirror descent and dual averaging. Within the framework of this family, we define new algorithms for constrained optimization…
This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…
We analyze the landscape and training dynamics of diagonal linear networks in a linear regression task, with the network parameters being perturbed by small isotropic normal noise. The addition of such noise may be interpreted as a…
The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…
We study stochastic optimization from a joint continuous-discrete point of view. Starting from a second-order stochastic differential equation interpreted as a noisy accelerated gradient flow, we discretize the dynamics by a fully implicit…
Based on SGD, previous works have proposed many algorithms that have improved convergence speed and generalization in stochastic optimization, such as SGDm, AdaGrad, Adam, etc. However, their convergence analysis under non-convex conditions…
This paper introduces a general framework for iterative optimization algorithms and establishes under general assumptions that their convergence is asymptotically geometric. We also prove that under appropriate assumptions, the rate of…
For nonconvex objective functions, including those found in training deep neural networks, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum is said to converge faster and have better generalizability than SGD without momentum. In particular,…
We study discrete-time mirror descent applied to the unregularized empirical risk in matrix sensing. In both the general case of rectangular matrices and the particular case of positive semidefinite matrices, a simple potential-based…
We provide a new understanding of the stochastic gradient bandit algorithm by showing that it converges to a globally optimal policy almost surely using \emph{any} constant learning rate. This result demonstrates that the stochastic…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
Stochastic composition optimization draws much attention recently and has been successful in many emerging applications of machine learning, statistical analysis, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we focus on the composition…
We analyze (stochastic) gradient descent (SGD) with delayed updates on smooth quasi-convex and non-convex functions and derive concise, non-asymptotic, convergence rates. We show that the rate of convergence in all cases consists of two…