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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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Azar Louzi

Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Harsh Vardhan , Sebastian U. Stich

This paper explores the non-convex composition optimization in the form including inner and outer finite-sum functions with a large number of component functions. This problem arises in some important applications such as nonlinear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Liu Liu , Ji Liu , Dacheng Tao

In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. More precisely, we interpret a large class of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-07 Andrei Kulunchakov , Julien Mairal

We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Zhize Li

We consider the optimization problem of minimizing the sum-of-nonconvex function, i.e., a convex function that is the average of nonconvex components. The existing stochastic algorithms for such a problem only focus on a single machine and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-06 Zhuanghua Liu , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-23 Xiao Wang , Shiqian Ma , Donald Goldfarb , Wei Liu

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-21 Fabio Nobile , Matteo Raviola , Nathan Schaeffer

This paper proposes a distributed stochastic algorithm with variance reduction for general smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization, which has wide applications in signal processing and machine learning communities. In distributed setting,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-23 Xia Jiang , Xianlin Zeng , Jian Sun , Jie Chen

In machine learning, nonconvex optimization problems with multiple local optimums are often encountered. Graduated Optimization Algorithm (GOA) is a popular heuristic method to obtain global optimums of nonconvex problems through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-11 Li Chen , Shuisheng Zhou , Zhuan Zhang

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-01 Ohad Shamir , Tong Zhang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Alexander Rakhlin , Ohad Shamir , Karthik Sridharan

Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large-scale machine learning problems, by virtue of its light complexity per iteration. However, it lags behind its non-stochastic counterparts with respect to the convergence rate,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-03-23 Vatsal Shah , Megasthenis Asteris , Anastasios Kyrillidis , Sujay Sanghavi

We introduce a generic scheme to solve nonconvex optimization problems using gradient-based algorithms originally designed for minimizing convex functions. Even though these methods may originally require convexity to operate, the proposed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-01-03 Courtney Paquette , Hongzhou Lin , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy , Julien Mairal , Zaid Harchaoui

In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. This point of view covers the stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-08 Andrei Kulunchakov , Julien Mairal

Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-17 Mengdi Wang , Ethan X. Fang , Han Liu

We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-06-11 Francis Bach , Eric Moulines

In this paper, we introduce an unbiased gradient simulation algorithms for solving convex optimization problem with stochastic function compositions. We show that the unbiased gradient generated from the algorithm has finite variance and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-22 Jose Blanchet , Donald Goldfarb , Garud Iyengar , Fengpei Li , Chaoxu Zhou

We develop a novel and single-loop variance-reduced algorithm to solve a class of stochastic nonconvex-convex minimax problems involving a nonconvex-linear objective function, which has various applications in different fields such as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-27 Quoc Tran-Dinh , Deyi Liu , Lam M. Nguyen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yunwen Lei , Zimeng Wang , Xiaoming Yuan