Related papers: One Method to Rule Them All: Variance Reduction fo…

We describe a novel optimization method for finite sums (such as empirical risk minimization problems) building on the recently introduced SAGA method. Our method achieves an accelerated convergence rate on strongly convex smooth problems.…

We develop a framework for convexifying a fairly general class of optimization problems. Under additional assumptions, we analyze the suboptimality of the solution to the convexified problem relative to the original nonconvex problem and…

In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of nonsmooth and convex functions. Such problems often arise in typical machine learning problems as empirical risk minimization, but are computationally…

We provide the first importance sampling variants of variance reduced algorithms for empirical risk minimization with non-convex loss functions. In particular, we analyze non-convex versions of SVRG, SAGA and SARAH. Our methods have the…

We propose and analyze a new stochastic gradient method, which we call Stochastic Unbiased Curvature-aided Gradient (SUCAG), for finite sum optimization problems. SUCAG constitutes an unbiased total gradient tracking technique that uses…

Stochastic variance reduced methods have shown strong performance in solving finite-sum problems. However, these methods usually require the users to manually tune the step-size, which is time-consuming or even infeasible for some…

In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…

In this two-part paper, we propose a general algorithmic framework for the minimization of a nonconvex smooth function subject to nonconvex smooth constraints. The algorithm solves a sequence of (separable) strongly convex problems and…

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…

Sparse learning is a very important tool for mining useful information and patterns from high dimensional data. Non-convex non-smooth regularized learning problems play essential roles in sparse learning, and have drawn extensive attentions…

In this study, we propose shrinkage methods based on {\it generalized ridge regression} (GRR) estimation which is suitable for both multicollinearity and high dimensional problems with small number of samples (large $p$, small $n$). Also,…

Recently there is a large amount of work devoted to the study of Markov chain stochastic gradient methods (MC-SGMs) which mainly focus on their convergence analysis for solving minimization problems. In this paper, we provide a…

Stochastic optimization algorithms are widely used for large-scale data analysis due to their low per-iteration costs, but they often suffer from slow asymptotic convergence caused by inherent variance. Variance-reduced techniques have been…

We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of finite sums of functions. We propose a simple, yet, practical way to incorporate variance reduction techniques into SignSGD, guaranteeing convergence that is similar to the full sign…

We study decentralized non-convex finite-sum minimization problems described over a network of nodes, where each node possesses a local batch of data samples. In this context, we analyze a single-timescale randomized incremental gradient…

We adapt the quasi-monotone method from [2] for composite convex minimization in the stochastic setting. For the proposed numerical scheme we derive the optimal convergence rate in terms of the last iterate, rather than on average as it is…

Selecting the best regularization parameter in inverse problems is a classical and yet challenging problem. Recently, data-driven approaches have become popular to tackle this challenge. These approaches are appealing since they do require…

In this work we explore the fundamental structure-adaptiveness of state of the art randomized first order algorithms on regularized empirical risk minimization tasks, where the solution has intrinsic low-dimensional structure (such as…

We propose a simple, scalable, and fast gradient descent algorithm to optimize a nonconvex objective for the rank minimization problem and a closely related family of semidefinite programs. With $O(r^3 \kappa^2 n \log n)$ random…

Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…