Related papers: Stabilized SVRG: Simple Variance Reduction for Non…

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…

We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…

We study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient…

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 variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is a popular variance reduction technique for accelerating stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We provide a first analysis of the method for solving a class of linear inverse problems in the lens…

We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…

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 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.…

Cubic regularization (CR) is an optimization method with emerging popularity due to its capability to escape saddle points and converge to second-order stationary solutions for nonconvex optimization. However, CR encounters a high sample…

We propose two algorithms that can find local minima faster than the state-of-the-art algorithms in both finite-sum and general stochastic nonconvex optimization. At the core of the proposed algorithms is $\text{One-epoch-SNVRG}^+$ using…

We propose a stochastic trust-region method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization that incorporates stochastic variance-reduced gradients (SVRG) to accelerate convergence. Unlike classical trust-region methods, the proposed algorithm…

In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…

We consider the problem of finding an approximate second-order stationary point of a constrained non-convex optimization problem. We first show that, unlike the gradient descent method for unconstrained optimization, the vanilla projected…

Stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is an accelerated version of stochastic gradient descent based on variance reduction, and is promising for solving large-scale inverse problems. In this work, we analyze SVRG and a regularized…

We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…

In this paper, we proposed a new technique, {\em variance controlled stochastic gradient} (VCSG), to improve the performance of the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithm. To avoid over-reducing the variance of gradient by…

We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…

In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original SVRG, called variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Unlike the choices of snapshot and starting points in SVRG and its proximal variant, Prox-SVRG, the two vectors…

Variance reduced stochastic gradient (SGD) methods converge significantly faster than the vanilla SGD counterpart. However, these methods are not very practical on large scale problems, as they either i) require frequent passes over the…

As application demands for zeroth-order (gradient-free) optimization accelerate, the need for variance reduced and faster converging approaches is also intensifying. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting: a) a comprehensive…