Related papers: Nonconvex Variance Reduced Optimization with Arbit…
In this paper, we propose a new SVRG-style acceleated stochastic algorithm for solving a family of non-convex optimization problems whose objective consists of a sum of $n$ smooth functions and a non-smooth convex function. Our major goal…
Driven by applications in telecommunication networks, we explore the simulation task of estimating rare event probabilities for tandem queues in their steady state. Existing literature has recognized that importance sampling methods can be…
We consider the problem of asynchronous stochastic optimization, where an optimization algorithm makes updates based on stale stochastic gradients of the objective that are subject to an arbitrary (possibly adversarial) sequence of delays.…
We study the problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a convex block-separable regularizer and propose a new randomized coordinate descent method, which we call ALPHA. Our method at every iteration updates a random…
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…
Machine learning algorithms in high-dimensional settings are highly susceptible to the influence of even a small fraction of structured outliers, making robust optimization techniques essential. In particular, within the…
The main goal of this work is equipping convex and nonconvex problems with Barzilai-Borwein (BB) step size. With the adaptivity of BB step sizes granted, they can fail when the objective function is not strongly convex. To overcome this…
Stochastic gradient algorithms estimate the gradient based on only one or a few samples and enjoy low computational cost per iteration. They have been widely used in large-scale optimization problems. However, stochastic gradient algorithms…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for variance reduced stochastic gradient descent methods such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new…
We provide the first theoretical analysis on the convergence rate of the asynchronous stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) descent algorithm on non-convex optimization. Recent studies have shown that the asynchronous stochastic…
The total complexity (measured as the total number of gradient computations) of a stochastic first-order optimization algorithm that finds a first-order stationary point of a finite-sum smooth nonconvex objective function $F(w)=\frac{1}{n}…
This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…
Bilevel optimization, the problem of minimizing a value function which involves the arg-minimum of another function, appears in many areas of machine learning. In a large scale empirical risk minimization setting where the number of samples…
We introduce adaptive sampling methods for stochastic programs with deterministic constraints. First, we propose and analyze a variant of the stochastic projected gradient method where the sample size used to approximate the reduced…
Soft random sampling (SRS) is a simple yet effective approach for efficient training of large-scale deep neural networks when dealing with massive data. SRS selects a subset uniformly at random with replacement from the full data set in…
Sample average approximation (SAA) replaces an intractable expected objective by an empirical average and is a basic device of modern stochastic optimization. We develop a rate theory for optimal values and empirical…
In solving simulation-based stochastic root-finding or optimization problems that involve rare events, such as in extreme quantile estimation, running crude Monte Carlo can be prohibitively inefficient. To address this issue, importance…
This paper presents a stochastic approximation proximal subgradient (SAPS) method for stochastic convex-concave minimax optimization. By accessing unbiased and variance bounded approximate subgradients, we show that this algorithm exhibits…
We consider the minimization of non-convex functions that typically arise in machine learning. Specifically, we focus our attention on a variant of trust region methods known as cubic regularization. This approach is particularly attractive…
We develop and analyze a new algorithm for empirical risk minimization, which is the key paradigm for training supervised machine learning models. Our method---SAGD---is based on a probabilistic interpolation of SAGA and gradient descent…