Related papers: Stochastic Quasi-Gradient Methods: Variance Reduct…
Variance reduction (VR) methods employ stochastic gradients with decreasing variance, and they have been widely applied to solve large-scale optimization problems in machine learning because of their efficiency. Existing theoretical studies…
Stochastic compositional optimization generalizes classic (non-compositional) stochastic optimization to the minimization of compositions of functions. Each composition may introduce an additional expectation. The series of expectations may…
This paper considers stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method for solving constrained convex minimization problems. In particular, a stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method with weighted iterate-averaging is investigated and its…
In this paper we introduce a unified analysis of a large family of variants of proximal stochastic gradient descent ({\tt SGD}) which so far have required different intuitions, convergence analyses, have different applications, and which…
Although with progress in introducing auxiliary amortized inference models, learning discrete latent variable models is still challenging. In this paper, we show that the annoying difficulty of obtaining reliable stochastic gradients for…
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…
Variance reduction methods such as SVRG and SpiderBoost use a mixture of large and small batch gradients to reduce the variance of stochastic gradients. Compared to SGD, these methods require at least double the number of operations per…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
Linear regression is a classic method of data analysis. In recent years, sketching -- a method of dimension reduction using random sampling, random projections, or both -- has gained popularity as an effective computational approximation…
Many optimization problems require balancing multiple conflicting objectives. As gradient descent is limited to single-objective optimization, we introduce its direct generalization: Jacobian descent (JD). This algorithm iteratively updates…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
We investigate stochastic Bregman proximal gradient (SBPG) methods for minimizing a finite-sum nonconvex function $\Psi(x):=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^nf_i(x)+\phi(x)$, where $\phi$ is convex and nonsmooth, while $f_i$, instead of gradient…
We develop a new primitive for stochastic optimization: a low-bias, low-cost estimator of the minimizer $x_\star$ of any Lipschitz strongly-convex function. In particular, we use a multilevel Monte-Carlo approach due to Blanchet and Glynn…
Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…
Stochastic gradient algorithms are often unstable when applied to functions that do not have Lipschitz-continuous and/or bounded gradients. Gradient clipping is a simple and effective technique to stabilize the training process for problems…
Machine learning, especially deep neural networks, has been rapidly developed in fields including computer vision, speech recognition and reinforcement learning. Although Mini-batch SGD is one of the most popular stochastic optimization…
Stochastic variance-reduced algorithms such as Stochastic Average Gradient (SAG) and SAGA, and their deterministic counterparts like the Incremental Aggregated Gradient (IAG) method, have been extensively studied in large-scale machine…
We consider the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm driven by a general stochastic sequence, including i.i.d noise and random walk on an arbitrary graph, among others; and analyze it in the asymptotic sense. Specifically, we employ…
We study a variation of vanilla stochastic gradient descent where the optimizer only has access to a Markovian sampling scheme. These schemes encompass applications that range from decentralized optimization with a random walker (token…