Related papers: On the Adaptivity of Stochastic Gradient-Based Opt…
We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of \emph{heterogeneous} functions distributed across several machines with a focus on communication efficiency. In such settings, naively using the classical stochastic…
Large-scale optimization problems require algorithms both effective and efficient. One such popular and proven algorithm is Stochastic Gradient Descent which uses first-order gradient information to solve these problems. This paper studies…
We study Stochastic Gradient Descent with AdaGrad stepsizes: a popular adaptive (self-tuning) method for first-order stochastic optimization. Despite being well studied, existing analyses of this method suffer from various shortcomings:…
Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithms have been shown to work favorably in solving large-scale learning problems. Despite the remarkable success, the stochastic gradient complexity of SVRG-type algorithms usually scales…
In this paper, we design two compressed decentralized algorithms for solving nonconvex stochastic optimization under two different scenarios. Both algorithms adopt a momentum technique to achieve fast convergence and a message-compression…
This paper considers a class of convex constrained nonsmooth convex stochastic composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable convex component, together with a general nonsmooth but…
In this work, we study the Stochastic Budgeted Multi-round Submodular Maximization (SBMSm) problem, where we aim to adaptively maximize the sum, over multiple rounds, of a monotone and submodular objective function defined on subsets of…
Adaptive gradient approaches that automatically adjust the learning rate on a per-feature basis have been very popular for training deep networks. This rich class of algorithms includes Adagrad, RMSprop, Adam, and recent extensions. All…
In this paper, we present a unified algorithm for stochastic optimization that makes use of a "momentum" term; in other words, the stochastic gradient depends not only on the current true gradient of the objective function, but also on the…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
The tuning of stochastic gradient algorithms (SGAs) for optimization and sampling is often based on heuristics and trial-and-error rather than generalizable theory. We address this theory--practice gap by characterizing the large-sample…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…
This paper deals with composite optimization problems having the objective function formed as the sum of two terms, one has Lipschitz continuous gradient along random subspaces and may be nonconvex and the second term is simple and…
We study optimization algorithms based on variance reduction for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Remarkable recent progress has been made in this direction through development of algorithms like SAG, SVRG, SAGA. These algorithms have…
Optimization algorithms are pivotal in advancing various scientific and industrial fields but often encounter obstacles such as trapping in local minima, saddle points, and plateaus (flat regions), which makes the convergence to reasonable…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is almost ubiquitously used for training non-convex optimization tasks. Recently, a hypothesis proposed by Keskar et al. [2017] that large batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers has received…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…
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…
The study of convex optimization has historically been concerned with worst-case convergence rates. The development of the Optimized Gradient Method (OGM), due to \citet{drori2012PerformanceOF,Kim2016optimal}, marked a major milestone in…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient…