Related papers: Natasha 2: Faster Non-Convex Optimization Than SGD
We consider solving a convex, possibly stochastic optimization problem over a randomly time-varying multi-agent network. Each agent has access to some local objective function, and it only has unbiased estimates of the gradients of the…
A long-standing problem in the theory of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is to prove that its without-replacement version RandomShuffle converges faster than the usual with-replacement version. We present the first (to our knowledge)…
In this paper, we proposed a new technique, {\em variance controlled stochastic gradient} (VCSG), to improve the performance of the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithm. To avoid over-reducing the variance of gradient by…
Local SGD is a promising approach to overcome the communication overhead in distributed learning by reducing the synchronization frequency among worker nodes. Despite the recent theoretical advances of local SGD in empirical risk…
We prove the local convergence to minima and estimates on the rate of convergence for the stochastic gradient descent method in the case of not necessarily globally convex nor contracting objective functions. In particular, the results are…
In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…
Stochastic gradient methods for minimizing nonconvex composite objective functions typically rely on the Lipschitz smoothness of the differentiable part, but this assumption fails in many important problem classes like quadratic inverse…
This paper considers a distributed stochastic strongly convex optimization, where agents connected over a network aim to cooperatively minimize the average of all agents' local cost functions. Due to the stochasticity of gradient estimation…
We establish the O($\frac{1}{k}$) convergence rate for distributed stochastic gradient methods that operate over strongly convex costs and random networks. The considered class of methods is standard each node performs a weighted average of…
We study stochastic algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems with a convex yet possibly nonsmooth regularizer, which find wide applications in many practical machine learning applications. However, compared to asynchronous…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a low-rank factorization is commonly employed to speed up matrix problems including matrix completion, subspace tracking, and SDP relaxation. In this paper, we exhibit a step size scheme for SGD on a…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
In this note we give a simple proof for the convergence of stochastic gradient (SGD) methods on $\mu$-convex functions under a (milder than standard) $L$-smoothness assumption. We show that for carefully chosen stepsizes SGD converges after…
Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…
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…
In this paper, we consider supervised learning problems such as logistic regression and study the stochastic gradient method with averaging, in the usual stochastic approximation setting where observations are used only once. We show that…
Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) have been extensively used for solving stochastic problems or large-scale machine learning problems. Recent works employ various techniques to improve the convergence rate of SGMs for both convex and…
Variance reduction techniques like SVRG provide simple and fast algorithms for optimizing a convex finite-sum objective. For nonconvex objectives, these techniques can also find a first-order stationary point (with small gradient). However,…