Related papers: First-order Stochastic Algorithms for Escaping Fro…
Neural stochastic differential equation model with a Brownian motion term can capture epistemic uncertainty of deep neural network from the perspective of a dynamical system. The goal of this paper is to improve the convergence rate of the…
A commonly used heuristic in non-convex optimization is Normalized Gradient Descent (NGD) - a variant of gradient descent in which only the direction of the gradient is taken into account and its magnitude ignored. We analyze this heuristic…
The problem of saddle-point avoidance for non-convex optimization is quite challenging in large scale distributed learning frameworks, such as Federated Learning, especially in the presence of Byzantine workers. The celebrated…
Stochastic second-order methods achieve fast local convergence in strongly convex optimization by using noisy Hessian estimates to precondition the gradient. However, these methods typically reach superlinear convergence only when the…
Stochastic optimization is a vital field in the realm of mathematical optimization, finding applications in diverse areas ranging from operations research to machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a novel first-order optimization…
In this paper, we study a class of deterministically constrained stochastic optimization problems. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-stochastic stationary point, where the expected violations of both constraints and…
In this paper, we present novel randomized algorithms for solving saddle point problems whose dual feasible region is given by the direct product of many convex sets. Our algorithms can achieve an ${\cal O}(1/N)$ and ${\cal O}(1/N^2)$ rate…
Nonconvex optimization underlies many modern machine learning and control tasks, where saddle points pose the dominant obstacle to reliable convergence in high-dimensional settings. Escaping these saddle points deterministically using…
Stochastic gradient descent and other first-order variants, such as Adam and AdaGrad, are commonly used in the field of deep learning due to their computational efficiency and low-storage memory requirements. However, these methods do not…
Optimizing smooth convex functions in stochastic settings, where only noisy estimates of gradients and Hessians are available, is a fundamental problem in optimization. While first-order methods possess a low per-iteration cost, their…
We study a fixed step-size noisy distributed gradient descent algorithm for solving optimization problems in which the objective is a finite sum of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Random perturbations are introduced to the…
We investigate the convergence properties of a stochastic primal-dual splitting algorithm for solving structured monotone inclusions involving the sum of a cocoercive operator and a composite monotone operator. The proposed method is the…
Incorporating second order curvature information in gradient based methods have shown to improve convergence drastically despite its computational intensity. In this paper, we propose a stochastic (online) quasi-Newton method with…
Nonconvex optimization algorithms with random initialization have attracted increasing attention recently. It has been showed that many first-order methods always avoid saddle points with random starting points. In this paper, we answer a…
We present a scheme improving the minimum-mode following method for finding first order saddle points by confining the displacements of atoms to the subset of those subject to the largest force. By doing so it is ensured that the…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
In a series of papers \cite{LSJR16, PP17, LPP}, it was established that some of the most commonly used first order methods almost surely (under random initializations) and with step-size being small enough, avoid strict saddle points, as…
We study stochastic nonconvex optimization under heavy-tailed noise. In this setting, the stochastic gradients only have bounded $p$-th central moment ($p$-BCM) for some $p \in (1,2]$. Building on the foundational work of Arjevani et al.…
We study momentum-based first-order optimization algorithms in which the iterations utilize information from the two previous steps and are subject to an additive white noise. This setup uses noise to account for uncertainty in either…
In this paper, we propose a new accelerated stochastic first-order method called clipped-SSTM for smooth convex stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed distributed noise in stochastic gradients and derive the first high-probability…