English
Related papers

Related papers: Revisiting the Polyak step size

200 papers

A landmark result of non-smooth convex optimization is that gradient descent is an optimal algorithm whenever the number of computed gradients is smaller than the dimension $d$. In this paper we study the extension of this result to the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-15 Sébastien Bubeck , Qijia Jiang , Yin Tat Lee , Yuanzhi Li , Aaron Sidford

In this work, we consider smooth unconstrained optimization problems and we deal with the class of gradient methods with momentum, i.e., descent algorithms where the search direction is defined as a linear combination of the current…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-04 Matteo Lapucci , Giampaolo Liuzzi , Stefano Lucidi , Davide Pucci , Marco Sciandrone

This paper is concerned with convergence of stochastic gradient algorithms with momentum terms in the nonconvex setting. A class of stochastic momentum methods, including stochastic gradient descent, heavy ball, and Nesterov's accelerated…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-01 Zixuan Wang , Shanjian Tang

Nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization has received intense attention over the last decade due to its broad applications in machine learning. Most existing algorithms rely on one-sided information, such as the convexity (resp. concavity)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Taoli Zheng , Linglingzhi Zhu , Anthony Man-Cho So , Jose Blanchet , Jiajin Li

Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Dravyansh Sharma

Stochastic (sub)gradient methods require step size schedule tuning to perform well in practice. Classical tuning strategies decay the step size polynomially and lead to optimal sublinear rates on (strongly) convex problems. An alternative…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-24 Damek Davis , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy , Vasileios Charisopoulos

We prove that the iterates produced by, either the scalar step size variant, or the coordinatewise variant of AdaGrad algorithm, are convergent sequences when applied to convex objective functions with Lipschitz gradient. The key insight is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-14 Cheik Traoré , Edouard Pauwels

This work investigates stepsize-based acceleration of gradient descent with {\em anytime} convergence guarantees. For smooth (non-strongly) convex optimization, we propose a stepsize schedule that allows gradient descent to achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Zihan Zhang , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du , Yuxin Chen

Primal-dual algorithms for the resolution of convex-concave saddle point problems usually come with one or several step size parameters. Within the range where convergence is guaranteed, choosing well the step size can make the difference…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-29 Olivier Fercoq

We present a novel class of projected gradient (PG) methods for minimizing a smooth but not necessarily convex function over a convex compact set. We first provide a novel analysis of the constant-stepsize PG method, achieving the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Guanghui Lan , Tianjiao Li , Yangyang Xu

Adaptive gradient methods are typically used for training over-parameterized models. To better understand their behaviour, we study a simplistic setting -- smooth, convex losses with models over-parameterized enough to interpolate the data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Sharan Vaswani , Issam Laradji , Frederik Kunstner , Si Yi Meng , Mark Schmidt , Simon Lacoste-Julien

In this paper we consider convex optimization problems with stochastic composite objective function subject to (possibly) infinite intersection of constraints. The objective function is expressed in terms of expectation operator over a sum…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-03 Ion Necoara , Nitesh Kumar Singh

We study the generalization performance of $\text{full-batch}$ optimization algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: these are first-order methods that only access the exact gradient of the empirical risk (rather than gradients with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-02 Idan Amir , Yair Carmon , Tomer Koren , Roi Livni

We propose first order algorithms for convex optimization problems where the feasible set is described by a large number of convex inequalities that is to be explored by subgradient projections. The first algorithm is an adaptation of a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-06-30 C. H. Jeffrey Pang

In this paper we present a new method for solving optimization problems involving the sum of two proper, convex, lower semicontinuous functions, one of which has Lipschitz continuous gradient. The proposed method has a hybrid nature that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-03 Kristian Bredies , Enis Chenchene , Alireza Hosseini

We present two approximate versions of the proximal subgradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions (not necessarily differentiable). The algorithms involve, at each iteration, inexact evaluations of the proximal operator…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-12 Reinier Díaz Millán , Majela Pentón Machado

This paper addresses smooth convexly constrained optimization problems where the Euclidean projection onto the feasible set is computationally tractable. Although momentum techniques like Polyak's heavy-ball are known for accelerating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-20 Federica Donnini , Pierluigi Mansueto

This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-22 Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Nadav Hallak , Ali Kavis , Volkan Cevher

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of a Lipschitz differentiable convex function $f$ and a proper closed convex function $h$ that admits efficient linear minimization oracles, subject to multiple smooth convex inequality…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-22 Xiaozhou Wang , Ting Kei Pong , Zev Woodstock

This paper focuses on investigating an inexact stochastic model-based optimization algorithm that integrates preconditioning techniques for solving stochastic composite optimization problems. The proposed framework unifies and extends the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-12 Chenglong Bao , Yancheng Yuan , Shulan Zhu