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Large-scale distributed optimization is of great importance in various applications. For data-parallel based distributed learning, the inter-node gradient communication often becomes the performance bottleneck. In this paper, we propose the…
The Barzilai and Borwein (BB) gradient method is one of the most widely-used line-search gradient methods. It computes the step-size for the current iterate by using the information carried in the previous iteration. Recently, William Kahan…
We propose mS2GD: a method incorporating a mini-batching scheme for improving the theoretical complexity and practical performance of semi-stochastic gradient descent (S2GD). We consider the problem of minimizing a strongly convex function…
The right batch size is important when training language models at scale: a large batch size is necessary for fast training, but a batch size that is too large will harm token efficiency. To navigate this tradeoff, McCandlish et al. (2018)…
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…
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…
The learning rate is an important tuning parameter for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and can greatly influence its performance. However, appropriate selection of a learning rate schedule across all iterations typically requires a…
Gradient information on the sampling distribution can be used to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators via Stein's method. An important application is that of estimating an expectation of a test function along the sample path of a…
Tuning the step size of stochastic gradient descent is tedious and error prone. This has motivated the development of methods that automatically adapt the step size using readily available information. In this paper, we consider the family…
Optimization with noisy gradients has become ubiquitous in statistics and machine learning. Reparameterization gradients, or gradient estimates computed via the "reparameterization trick," represent a class of noisy gradients often used in…
Informative gradients are often lost in large batch updates. We propose a robust mechanism to reinforce the sparse components within a random batch of data points. A finite queue of online gradients is used to determine their expected…
In this work, we investigate a stochastic gradient descent method for solving inverse problems that can be written as systems of linear or nonlinear ill-posed equations in Banach spaces. The method uses only a randomly selected equation at…
Recently proposed gradient estimators enable gradient descent over stochastic programs with discrete jumps in the response surface, which are not covered by automatic differentiation (AD) alone. Although these estimators' capability to…
Numerous Optimization Algorithms have a time-varying update rule thanks to, for instance, a changing step size, momentum parameter or, Hessian approximation. In this paper, we apply unrolled or automatic differentiation to a time-varying…
Many structured data-fitting applications require the solution of an optimization problem involving a sum over a potentially large number of measurements. Incremental gradient algorithms offer inexpensive iterations by sampling a subset of…
Motivated by penalized likelihood maximization in complex models, we study optimization problems where neither the function to optimize nor its gradient have an explicit expression, but its gradient can be approximated by a Monte Carlo…
We study the use of approximate Lagrange multipliers and discrete actions in solving convex optimisation problems. We observe that descent, which can be ensured using a wide range of approaches (gradient, subgradient, Newton, etc.), is…
This paper explores two recent methods for learning rate optimisation in stochastic gradient descent: D-Adaptation (arXiv:2301.07733) and probabilistic line search (arXiv:1502.02846). These approaches aim to alleviate the burden of…
In this paper we introduce a family of stochastic gradient estimation techniques based of the perturbative expansion around the mean of the sampling distribution. We characterize the bias and variance of the resulting Taylor-corrected…
This paper presents a methodology for using varying sample sizes in sequential quadratic programming (SQP) methods for solving equality constrained stochastic optimization problems. The first part of the paper deals with the delicate issue…