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We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…
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…
The paper studies the solution of stochastic optimization problems in which approximations to the gradient and Hessian are obtained through subsampling. We first consider Newton-like methods that employ these approximations and discuss how…
In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…
This paper considers unconstrained convex optimization problems with time-varying objective functions. We propose algorithms with a discrete time-sampling scheme to find and track the solution trajectory based on prediction and correction…
We present a finite-time analysis of two smoothed functional stochastic approximation algorithms for simulation-based optimization. The first is a two time-scale gradient-based method, while the second is a three time-scale Newton-based…
In this paper, we investigate a second-order stochastic algorithm for solving large-scale binary classification problems. We propose to make use of a new hybrid stochastic Newton algorithm that includes two weighted components in the…
To minimize the average of a set of log-convex functions, the stochastic Newton method iteratively updates its estimate using subsampled versions of the full objective's gradient and Hessian. We contextualize this optimization problem as…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
We present two new remarkably simple stochastic second-order methods for minimizing the average of a very large number of sufficiently smooth and strongly convex functions. The first is a stochastic variant of Newton's method (SN), and the…
We propose a randomized second-order method for optimization known as the Newton Sketch: it is based on performing an approximate Newton step using a randomly projected or sub-sampled Hessian. For self-concordant functions, we prove that…
In this paper, we consider stochastic second-order methods for minimizing a finite summation of nonconvex functions. One important key is to find an ingenious but cheap scheme to incorporate local curvature information. Since the true…
We show that, for finite-sum minimization problems, incorporating partial second-order information of the objective function can dramatically improve the robustness to mini-batch size of variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods, making…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
In non-linear estimations, it is common to assess sampling uncertainty by bootstrap inference. For complex models, this can be computationally intensive. This paper combines optimization with resampling: turning stochastic optimization into…
We study stochastic Cubic Newton methods for solving general possibly non-convex minimization problems. We propose a new framework, which we call the helper framework, that provides a unified view of the stochastic and variance-reduced…
We develop a framework for convexifying a fairly general class of optimization problems. Under additional assumptions, we analyze the suboptimality of the solution to the convexified problem relative to the original nonconvex problem and…
In this paper, we consider an unconstrained optimization model where the objective is a sum of a large number of possibly nonconvex functions, though overall the objective is assumed to be smooth and convex. Our bid to solving such model…
We consider a composite convex minimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization, which often arises in machine learning. We propose two new stochastic gradient methods that are based on stochastic dual averaging…
We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…