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Mirror Descent (MD) is a well-known method of solving non-smooth convex optimization problems. This paper analyzes the stochastic variant of MD with adaptive stepsizes. Its convergence on average is shown to be faster than with the fixed…
The distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by a sum of $n$ local cost functions by using local information exchange is considered. This problem is an important component of many machine…
We study the convergence properties and escape dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in one-dimensional landscapes, separately considering infinite- and finite-variance noise. Our main focus is to identify the time scales on which…
The success of deep neural networks hinges on our ability to accurately and efficiently optimize high-dimensional, non-convex functions. In this paper, we empirically investigate the loss functions of state-of-the-art networks, and how…
We consider the problem of finding local minimizers in non-convex and non-smooth optimization. Under the assumption of strict saddle points, positive results have been derived for first-order methods. We present the first known results for…
We propose a mini-batching scheme for improving the theoretical complexity and practical performance of semi-stochastic gradient descent applied to the problem of minimizing a strongly convex composite function represented as the sum of an…
Alternating gradient-descent-ascent (AltGDA) is an optimization algorithm that has been widely used for model training in various machine learning applications, which aims to solve a nonconvex minimax optimization problem. However, the…
Distributed optimization advances centralized machine learning methods by enabling parallel and decentralized learning processes over a network of computing nodes. This work provides an accelerated consensus-based distributed algorithm for…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…
In this paper, we investigate the theoretical properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for statistical inference in the context of nonconvex optimization problems, which have been relatively unexplored compared to convex settings.…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum is widely used for training modern deep learning architectures. While it is well-understood that using momentum can lead to faster convergence rate in various settings, it has also been…
Recent years have seen increased interest in performance guarantees of gradient descent algorithms for non-convex optimization. A number of works have uncovered that gradient noise plays a critical role in the ability of gradient descent…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been found to be surprisingly effective in training a variety of deep neural networks. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how and why SGD can train these complex networks towards a…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…
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…
A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…
In distributed training of deep neural networks, people usually run Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) or its variants on each machine and communicate with other machines periodically. However, SGD might converge slowly in training some deep…