Related papers: Stochastic Non-convex Optimization with Strong Hig…

We propose and analyze a stochastic Newton algorithm for homogeneous distributed stochastic convex optimization, where each machine can calculate stochastic gradients of the same population objective, as well as stochastic Hessian-vector…

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…

Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…

We introduce a hybrid stochastic estimator to design stochastic gradient algorithms for solving stochastic optimization problems. Such a hybrid estimator is a convex combination of two existing biased and unbiased estimators and leads to…

We propose a stochastic trust-region method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization that incorporates stochastic variance-reduced gradients (SVRG) to accelerate convergence. Unlike classical trust-region methods, the proposed algorithm…

Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

This paper provides a review and commentary on the past, present, and future of numerical optimization algorithms in the context of machine learning applications. Through case studies on text classification and the training of deep neural…

In this paper, we propose algorithms that exploit negative curvature for solving noisy nonlinear nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. We consider both deterministic and stochastic inexact settings, and develop two-step algorithms…

In this work, we consider constrained stochastic optimization problems under hidden convexity, i.e., those that admit a convex reformulation via non-linear (but invertible) map $c(\cdot)$. A number of non-convex problems ranging from…

Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…

In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that only stochastic information of the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle…

Driven by the need to solve increasingly complex optimization problems in signal processing and machine learning, there has been increasing interest in understanding the behavior of gradient-descent algorithms in non-convex environments.…

This paper considers the distributed convex-concave minimax optimization under the second-order similarity. We propose stochastic variance-reduced optimistic gradient sliding (SVOGS) method, which takes the advantage of the finite-sum…

We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…

In this paper, we consider the problem of stochastic optimization, where the objective function is in terms of the expectation of a (possibly non-convex) cost function that is parametrized by a random variable. While the convergence speed…

We design a stochastic algorithm to train any smooth neural network to $\varepsilon$-approximate local minima, using $O(\varepsilon^{-3.25})$ backpropagations. The best result was essentially $O(\varepsilon^{-4})$ by SGD. More broadly, it…

This paper studies distributed nonconvex optimization problems with stochastic gradients for a multi-agent system, in which each agent aims to minimize the sum of all agents' cost functions by using local compressed information exchange. We…

Second-order optimization methods exhibit fast convergence to critical points, however, in nonconvex optimization, these methods often require restrictive step-sizes to ensure a monotonically decreasing objective function. In the presence…

We study non-smooth stochastic decentralized optimization problems over time-varying networks, where objective functions are distributed across nodes and network connections may intermittently appear or break. Specifically, we consider two…