Related papers: A Stochastic Decoupling Method for Minimizing the …

We study the iteration complexity of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for minimizing the gradient norm of smooth, possibly nonconvex functions. We provide several results, implying that the $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ upper bound of…

We propose a single time-scale stochastic subgradient method for constrained optimization of a composition of several nonsmooth and nonconvex functions. The functions are assumed to be locally Lipschitz and differentiable in a generalized…

In this paper we consider finite sum composite convex optimization problems with many functional constraints. The objective function is expressed as a finite sum of two terms, one of which admits easy computation of (sub)gradients while the…

We consider saddle point problems which objective functions are the average of $n$ strongly convex-concave individual components. Recently, researchers exploit variance reduction methods to solve such problems and achieve linear-convergence…

This note studies the distributed non-convex optimization problem with non-smooth regularization, which has wide applications in decentralized learning, estimation and control. The objective function is the sum of different local objective…

We consider a composite convex minimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization, which often arises in machine learning. We propose two new stochastic gradient methods that are based on stochastic dual averaging…

For finite-dimensional problems, stochastic approximation methods have long been used to solve stochastic optimization problems. Their application to infinite-dimensional problems is less understood, particularly for nonconvex objectives.…

In this paper, we propose a new SVRG-style acceleated stochastic algorithm for solving a family of non-convex optimization problems whose objective consists of a sum of $n$ smooth functions and a non-smooth convex function. Our major goal…

In this paper we consider the unconstrained minimization problem of a smooth function in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$ in a setting where only function evaluations are possible. We design a novel randomized derivative-free algorithm --- the stochastic…

Gradient normalization and soft clipping are two popular techniques for tackling instability issues and improving convergence of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum. In this article, we study these types of methods through the…

We deal with the problem of gradient estimation for stochastic differentiable relaxations of algorithms, operators, simulators, and other non-differentiable functions. Stochastic smoothing conventionally perturbs the input of a…

We consider minimizing finite-sum and expectation objective functions via Hessian-averaging based subsampled Newton methods. These methods allow for gradient inexactness and have fixed per-iteration Hessian approximation costs. The recent…

In this work, we study the problem of minimizing the sum of strongly convex functions split over a network of $n$ nodes. We propose the decentralized and asynchronous algorithm ADFS to tackle the case when local functions are themselves…

We introduce a new approach to develop stochastic optimization algorithms for a class of stochastic composite and possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The main idea is to combine two stochastic estimators to create a new hybrid one. We…

Consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one being smooth and the other non-smooth. In this paper, we introduce a general class of approximate proximal splitting (APS) methods for solving such minimization…

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 present an algorithm for minimizing a sum of functions that combines the computational efficiency of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with the second order curvature information leveraged by quasi-Newton methods. We unify these…

Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem,…

This paper considers non-smooth optimization problems where we seek to minimize the pointwise maximum of a continuously parameterized family of functions. Since the objective function is given as the solution to a maximization problem,…

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…