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This paper studies distributed nonconvex optimization problems with stochastic gradients for a multi-agent system, in which each agent aims to minimize the sum of all agents' cost functions by using local compressed information exchange. We…
In non-smooth stochastic optimization, we establish the non-convergence of the stochastic subgradient descent (SGD) to the critical points recently called active strict saddles by Davis and Drusvyatskiy. Such points lie on a manifold $M$…
We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…
We propose and analyze several stochastic gradient algorithms for finding stationary points or local minimum in nonconvex, possibly with nonsmooth regularizer, finite-sum and online optimization problems. First, we propose a simple proximal…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
Motivated by the super-diffusivity of self-repelling random walk, which has roots in statistical physics, this paper develops a new perturbation mechanism for optimization algorithms. In this mechanism, perturbations are adapted to the…
We prove that various stochastic gradient descent methods, including the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), stochastic heavy-ball (SHB), and stochastic Nesterov's accelerated gradient (SNAG) methods, almost surely avoid any strict saddle…
Adaptive gradient methods have attracted much attention of machine learning communities due to the high efficiency. However their acceleration effect in practice, especially in neural network training, is hard to analyze, theoretically. The…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the method of choice in many machine learning tasks thanks to its scalability and efficiency in dealing with large-scale problems. In this paper, we focus on the shuffling version of SGD which…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
The Stochastic Gradient Descent method (SGD) and its stochastic variants have become methods of choice for solving finite-sum optimization problems arising from machine learning and data science thanks to their ability to handle large-scale…
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…
Understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants is essential for machine learning. However, most of the preceding analyses are conducted under amenable conditions such as unbiased gradient estimator and bounded objective…
In this paper, we study the convergence properties of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method for finding a stationary point of a given objective function $J(\cdot)$. The objective function is not required to be convex. Rather, our…
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…
In this paper, we study the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method for the nonconvex nonsmooth optimization, and propose an accelerated SGD method by combining the variance reduction technique with Nesterov's extrapolation technique.…
This article examines the implicit regularization effect of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). We consider the case of SGD without replacement, the variant typically used to optimize large-scale neural networks. We analyze this algorithm in…