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

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has played a central role in machine learning. However, it requires a carefully hand-picked stepsize for fast convergence, which is notoriously tedious and time-consuming to tune. Over the last several…

Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) have been extensively used for solving stochastic problems or large-scale machine learning problems. Recent works employ various techniques to improve the convergence rate of SGMs for both convex and…

In this paper, we consider the general non-oblivious stochastic optimization where the underlying stochasticity may change during the optimization procedure and depends on the point at which the function is evaluated. We develop Stochastic…

Smooth convex minimization over the unit trace-norm ball is an important optimization problem in machine learning, signal processing, statistics and other fields, that underlies many tasks in which one wishes to recover a low-rank matrix…

A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…

Decentralized stochastic optimization has recently benefited from gradient tracking methods \cite{DSGT_Pu,DSGT_Xin} providing efficient solutions for large-scale empirical risk minimization problems. In Part I \cite{GT_SAGA} of this work,…

We consider the problem of training a deep neural network with nonsmooth regularization to retrieve a sparse and efficient sub-structure. Our regularizer is only assumed to be lower semi-continuous and prox-bounded. We combine an adaptive…

We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of first-order methods for escaping strict saddle points in smooth non-convex optimization. Our main contribution is a Perturbed Saddle-escape Descent (PSD) algorithm with fully explicit…

Gradient clipping is a standard training technique used in deep learning applications such as large-scale language modeling to mitigate exploding gradients. Recent experimental studies have demonstrated a fairly special behavior in the…

This paper proposes a family of online second order methods for possibly non-convex stochastic optimizations based on the theory of preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (PSGD), which can be regarded as an enhance stochastic Newton…

This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…

We develop a novel and single-loop variance-reduced algorithm to solve a class of stochastic nonconvex-convex minimax problems involving a nonconvex-linear objective function, which has various applications in different fields such as…

Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient (SVRG), introduced by Johnson & Zhang (2013), is a theoretically compelling optimization method. However, as Defazio & Bottou (2019) highlight, its effectiveness in deep learning is yet to be proven. In…

We present a subgradient method for minimizing non-smooth, non-Lipschitz convex optimization problems. The only structure assumed is that a strictly feasible point is known. We extend the work of Renegar [5] by taking a different…

SVRG and its variants are among the state of art optimization algorithms for large scale machine learning problems. It is well known that SVRG converges linearly when the objective function is strongly convex. However this setup can be…

We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…

A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…

Random Reshuffling (RR), also known as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) without replacement, is a popular and theoretically grounded method for finite-sum minimization. We propose two new algorithms: Proximal and Federated Random…

Variance reduction techniques are popular in accelerating gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent for optimization problems defined on both Euclidean space and Riemannian manifold. In this paper, we further improve on existing…

In this paper, we introduce a Homogeneous Second-Order Descent Method (HSODM) using the homogenized quadratic approximation to the original function. The merit of homogenization is that only the leftmost eigenvector of a gradient-Hessian…