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There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Derivative-free optimization has become an important technique used in machine learning for optimizing black-box models. To conduct updates without explicitly computing gradient, most current approaches iteratively sample a random search…

Stochastic-gradient-based optimization has been a core enabling methodology in applications to large-scale problems in machine learning and related areas. Despite the progress, the gap between theory and practice remains significant, with…

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…

Several useful variance-reduced stochastic gradient algorithms, such as SVRG, SAGA, Finito, and SAG, have been proposed to minimize empirical risks with linear convergence properties to the exact minimizer. The existing convergence results…

In this work, we investigate the idea of variance reduction by studying its properties with general adaptive mirror descent algorithms in nonsmooth nonconvex finite-sum optimization problems. We propose a simple yet generalized framework…

In this work we propose the use of adaptive stochastic search as a building block for general, non-convex optimization operations within deep neural network architectures. Specifically, for an objective function located at some layer in the…

In decentralized learning, a network of nodes cooperate to minimize an overall objective function that is usually the finite-sum of their local objectives, and incorporates a non-smooth regularization term for the better generalization…

We propose stochastic variance reduced algorithms for solving convex-concave saddle point problems, monotone variational inequalities, and monotone inclusions. Our framework applies to extragradient, forward-backward-forward, and…

Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization…

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 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.…

We study the stochastic Riemannian gradient algorithm for matrix eigen-decomposition. The state-of-the-art stochastic Riemannian algorithm requires the learning rate to decay to zero and thus suffers from slow convergence and sub-optimal…

The learning rate is perhaps the single most important parameter in the training of neural networks and, more broadly, in stochastic (nonconvex) optimization. Accordingly, there are numerous effective, but poorly understood, techniques for…

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…

State-of-the-art training algorithms for deep learning models are based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Recently, many variations have been explored: perturbing parameters for better accuracy (such as in Extragradient), limiting SGD…

We analyze convergence rates of stochastic optimization procedures for non-smooth convex optimization problems. By combining randomized smoothing techniques with accelerated gradient methods, we obtain convergence rates of stochastic…

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 develop two novel stochastic variance-reduction methods to approximate solutions of a class of nonmonotone [generalized] equations. Our algorithms leverage a new combination of ideas from the forward-reflected-backward splitting method…