Related papers: Breaking the Span Assumption Yields Fast Finite-Su…

In this work, we consider a constrained convex problem with linear inequalities and provide an inexact penalty re-formulation of the problem. The novelty is in the choice of the penalty functions, which are smooth and can induce a non-zero…

Structured problems arise in many applications. To solve these problems, it is important to leverage the structure information. This paper focuses on convex problems with a finite-sum compositional structure. Finite-sum problems appear as…

A matrix algorithm runs superfast (aka at sublinear cost) if it involves much fewer flops and memory cells than an input matrix has entries. Big Data are frequently represented by matrices of immense sizes that cannot be handled directly…

We propose a novel randomized incremental gradient algorithm, namely, VAriance-Reduced Accelerated Gradient (Varag), for finite-sum optimization. Equipped with a unified step-size policy that adjusts itself to the value of the condition…

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a highly effective regularization technique for improving the generalization of deep neural networks for various settings. However, the underlying working of SAM remains elusive because of various…

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a powerful method for improving generalization in machine learning models by minimizing the sharpness of the loss landscape. However, despite its success, several important questions…

In the context of finite sums minimization, variance reduction techniques are widely used to improve the performance of state-of-the-art stochastic gradient methods. Their practical impact is clear, as well as their theoretical properties.…

In this paper, we propose a novel accelerated gradient method called ANITA for solving the fundamental finite-sum optimization problems. Concretely, we consider both general convex and strongly convex settings: i) For general convex…

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising alternative optimizer to stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The originally-proposed motivation behind SAM was to bias neural networks towards flatter minima that are believed to…

Self-attributing neural networks (SANNs) present a potential path towards interpretable models for high-dimensional problems, but often face significant trade-offs in performance. In this work, we formally prove a lower bound on errors of…

Stochastic gradient (SG) methods are fundamental to system identification and machine learning, enabling online parameter estimation in large-scale and streaming-data settings. As a classical identification method, the SG algorithm has been…

We develop a simple routine unifying the analysis of several important recently-developed stochastic optimization methods including SAGA, Finito, and stochastic dual coordinate ascent (SDCA). First, we show an intrinsic connection between…

We analyze the convergence rate of the random reshuffling (RR) method, which is a randomized first-order incremental algorithm for minimizing a finite sum of convex component functions. RR proceeds in cycles, picking a uniformly random…

The progressive hedging algorithm (PHA) is a cornerstone among algorithms for large-scale stochastic programming problems. However, its traditional implementation is hindered by some limitations, including the requirement to solve all…

The stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) is widely used to perform exact forward simulation of discrete stochastic processes in biology. However, the computational cost, driven by sequential event-by-event sampling across large ensembles,…

We consider saddle point problems which objective functions are the average of $n$ strongly convex-concave individual components. Recently, researchers exploit variance reduction methods to solve such problems and achieve linear-convergence…

In this note we propose a new variant of the hybrid variance-reduced proximal gradient method in [7] to solve a common stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problem under standard assumptions. We simply replace the independent…

Sample average approximation (SAA), a popular method for tractably solving stochastic optimization problems, enjoys strong asymptotic performance guarantees in settings with independent training samples. However, these guarantees are not…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, but it must balance limited effective context, redundant retrieved evidence, and the loss of fine-grained facts under aggressive compression.…

We introduce two new stochastic conjugate frameworks for a class of nonconvex and possibly also nonsmooth optimization problems. These frameworks are built upon Stochastic Recursive Gradient Algorithm (SARAH) and we thus refer to them as…