Related papers: Tight Analyses for Non-Smooth Stochastic Gradient …

Gradient descent is the primary workhorse for optimizing large-scale problems in machine learning. However, its performance is highly sensitive to the choice of the learning rate. A key limitation of gradient descent is its lack of natural…

We consider a class of stochastic gradient optimization schemes. Assuming that the objective function is strongly convex, we prove weak error estimates which are uniform in time for the error between the solution of the numerical scheme,…

This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…

In this paper we study the problem of minimizing the average of a large number ($n$) of smooth convex loss functions. We propose a new method, S2GD (Semi-Stochastic Gradient Descent), which runs for one or several epochs in each of which a…

We study the oracle complexity of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization, with the algorithm assumed to have access only to local function information. It has been shown by Davis, Drusvyatskiy, and Jiang (2023) that for nonsmooth Lipschitz…

Algorithmic reproducibility measures the deviation in outputs of machine learning algorithms upon minor changes in the training process. Previous work suggests that first-order methods would need to trade-off convergence rate (gradient…

We consider the proximal-gradient method for minimizing an objective function that is the sum of a smooth function and a non-smooth convex function. A feature that distinguishes our work from most in the literature is that we assume that…

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of three convex functions: i) a smooth function $f$ in the form of an expectation or a finite average, ii) a non-smooth function $g$ in the form of a finite average of proximable functions…

Stochastic alternating algorithms for bi-objective optimization are considered when optimizing two conflicting functions for which optimization steps have to be applied separately for each function. Such algorithms consist of applying a…

We study the oracle complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz functions, in the sense proposed by Zhang et al. [2020]. While there exist dimension-free randomized algorithms for producing such points within…

We aim to make stochastic gradient descent (SGD) adaptive to (i) the noise $\sigma^2$ in the stochastic gradients and (ii) problem-dependent constants. When minimizing smooth, strongly-convex functions with condition number $\kappa$, we…

In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…

We show that high-accuracy guarantees for log-concave sampling -- that is, iteration and query complexities which scale as $\mathrm{poly}\log(1/\delta)$, where $\delta$ is the desired target accuracy -- are achievable using stochastic…

We provide larger step-size restrictions for which gradient descent based algorithms (almost surely) avoid strict saddle points. In particular, consider a twice differentiable (non-convex) objective function whose gradient has Lipschitz…

We consider gradient flow/gradient descent and heavy ball/accelerated gradient descent optimization for convex objective functions. In the gradient flow case, we prove the following: 1. If $f$ does not have a minimizer, the convergence…

We study a class of non-convex and non-smooth problems with \textit{rank} regularization to promote sparsity in optimal solution. We propose to apply the proximal gradient descent method to solve the problem and accelerate the process with…

In this note, we consider the complexity of optimizing a highly smooth (Lipschitz $k$-th order derivative) and strongly convex function, via calls to a $k$-th order oracle which returns the value and first $k$ derivatives of the function at…

This work provides the first convergence analysis for the Randomized Block Coordinate Descent method for minimizing a function that is both H\"older smooth and block H\"older smooth. Our analysis applies to objective functions that are…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for strongly convex functions converges at the rate $\bO(1/k)$. However, achieving good results in practice requires tuning the parameters (for example the learning rate) of the algorithm. In this paper we…

Several recent empirical studies demonstrate that important machine learning tasks, e.g., training deep neural networks, exhibit low-rank structure, where the loss function varies significantly in only a few directions of the input space.…