Related papers: Sample Efficient Stochastic Variance-Reduced Cubic…
In this paper, we propose a multilevel stochastic framework for the solution of nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. The proposed approach uses random regularized first-order models that exploit an available hierarchical…
We propose a generic framework based on a new stochastic variance-reduced gradient descent algorithm for accelerating nonconvex low-rank matrix recovery. Starting from an appropriate initial estimator, our proposed algorithm performs…
We consider the problem of minimizing the composition of a smooth (nonconvex) function and a smooth vector mapping, where the inner mapping is in the form of an expectation over some random variable or a finite sum. We propose a stochastic…
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…
Among the very first variance reduced stochastic methods for solving the empirical risk minimization problem was the SVRG method (Johnson & Zhang 2013). SVRG is an inner-outer loop based method, where in the outer loop a reference full…
We focus on minimizing nonconvex finite-sum functions that typically arise in machine learning problems. In an attempt to solve this problem, the adaptive cubic regularized Newton method has shown its strong global convergence guarantees…
We consider minimization of composite functions of the form $f(g(x))+h(x)$, where $f$ and $h$ are convex functions (which can be nonsmooth) and $g$ is a smooth vector mapping. In addition, we assume that $g$ is the average of finite number…
An algorithm for solving smooth nonconvex optimization problems is proposed that, in the worst-case, takes $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ iterations to drive the norm of the gradient of the objective function below a prescribed positive…
We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…
In this paper, we study a second-order approach to policy optimization in reinforcement learning. Existing second-order methods often suffer from suboptimal sample complexity or rely on unrealistic assumptions about importance sampling. To…
We study a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems in which the objective is a sum of two functions: One function is the average of a large number of differentiable functions, while the other function is proper, lower…
We provide the first importance sampling variants of variance reduced algorithms for empirical risk minimization with non-convex loss functions. In particular, we analyze non-convex versions of SVRG, SAGA and SARAH. Our methods have the…
Stochastic Proximal Gradient (SPG) methods have been widely used for solving optimization problems with a simple (possibly non-smooth) regularizer in machine learning and statistics. However, to the best of our knowledge no non-asymptotic…
Sparse learning is a very important tool for mining useful information and patterns from high dimensional data. Non-convex non-smooth regularized learning problems play essential roles in sparse learning, and have drawn extensive attentions…
Adaptive regularization with cubics (ARC) is an algorithm for unconstrained, non-convex optimization. Akin to the popular trust-region method, its iterations can be thought of as approximate, safe-guarded Newton steps. For cost functions…
We consider the minimization of a sum of an expectation-valued coordinate-wise $L_i$-smooth nonconvex function and a nonsmooth block-separable convex regularizer. We propose an asynchronous variance-reduced algorithm, where in each…
This paper considers the problem of recovering either a low rank matrix or a sparse vector from observations of linear combinations of the vector or matrix elements. Recent methods replace the non-convex regularization with $\ell_1$ or…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…
In recent years, random subspace methods have been actively studied for large-dimensional nonconvex problems. Recent subspace methods have improved theoretical guarantees such as iteration complexity and local convergence rate while…
We present a unified theorem for the convergence analysis of stochastic gradient algorithms for minimizing a smooth and convex loss plus a convex regularizer. We do this by extending the unified analysis of Gorbunov, Hanzely \& Richt\'arik…