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There has been a growing effort in studying the distributed optimization problem over a network. The objective is to optimize a global function formed by a sum of local functions, using only local computation and communication. Literature…
Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…
Popular approaches for minimizing loss in data-driven learning often involve an abstraction or an explicit retention of the history of gradients for efficient parameter updates. The aggregated history of gradients nudges the parameter…
Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large-scale machine learning problems, by virtue of its light complexity per iteration. However, it lags behind its non-stochastic counterparts with respect to the convergence rate,…
One of the most widely used methods for solving large-scale stochastic optimization problems is distributed asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (DASGD), a family of algorithms that result from parallelizing stochastic gradient descent…
We consider distributed optimization over networks where each agent is associated with a smooth and strongly convex local objective function. We assume that the agents only have access to unbiased estimators of the gradient of their…
Large-scale non-convex sparsity-constrained problems have recently gained extensive attention. Most existing deterministic optimization methods (e.g., GraSP) are not suitable for large-scale and high-dimensional problems, and thus…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
Gradient boosting is a state-of-the-art prediction technique that sequentially produces a model in the form of linear combinations of simple predictors---typically decision trees---by solving an infinite-dimensional convex optimization…
Despite an extensive body of literature on deep learning optimization, our current understanding of what makes an optimization algorithm effective is fragmented. In particular, we do not understand well whether enhanced optimization…
Current state-of-the-art optimizers are adaptive gradient-based optimization methods such as Adam. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in formulating gradient-based optimizers in a probabilistic framework for better modeling the…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…
Distributed optimization problems usually face inexact communication issues induced by channel noise, communication quantization or differential privacy protection. Most existing algorithms need a two-timescale setting of the stepsize of…
(Mini-batch) Stochastic Gradient Descent is a popular optimization method which has been applied to many machine learning applications. But a rather high variance introduced by the stochastic gradient in each step may slow down the…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…
In this work, we study an optimizer, Grad-Avg to optimize error functions. We establish the convergence of the sequence of iterates of Grad-Avg mathematically to a minimizer (under boundedness assumption). We apply Grad-Avg along with some…
Accelerating the convergence of second-order optimization, particularly Newton-type methods, remains a pivotal challenge in algorithmic research. In this paper, we extend previous work on the \textbf{Quadratic Gradient (QG)} and rigorously…
Matrix completion, where we wish to recover a low rank matrix by observing a few entries from it, is a widely studied problem in both theory and practice with wide applications. Most of the provable algorithms so far on this problem have…
We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…
This paper provides a review and commentary on the past, present, and future of numerical optimization algorithms in the context of machine learning applications. Through case studies on text classification and the training of deep neural…