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Adaptive gradient methods, such as AdaGrad, are among the most successful optimization algorithms for neural network training. While these methods are known to achieve better dimensional dependence than stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for…

We study first-order methods for convex optimization problems with functions $f$ satisfying the recently proposed $\ell$-smoothness condition $||\nabla^{2}f(x)|| \le \ell\left(||\nabla f(x)||\right),$ which generalizes the $L$-smoothness…

Consider the problem of minimizing functions that are Lipschitz and strongly convex, but not necessarily differentiable. We prove that after $T$ steps of stochastic gradient descent, the error of the final iterate is $O(\log(T)/T)$ with…

Stochastic gradient descent without replacement sampling is widely used in practice for model training. However, the vast majority of SGD analyses assumes data is sampled with replacement, and when the function minimized is strongly convex,…

When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has become the standard algorithm for training machine learning models with rigorous privacy guarantees. Despite its widespread use, the theoretical understanding of its long-run…

Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…

We propose a novel stochastic smoothing accelerated gradient (SSAG) method for general constrained nonsmooth convex composite optimization, and analyze the convergence rates. The SSAG method allows various smoothing techniques, and can deal…

Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…

The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…

We consider the minimization of an objective function given access to unbiased estimates of its gradient through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with constant step-size. While the detailed analysis was only performed for quadratic…

The vast majority of convergence rates analysis for stochastic gradient methods in the literature focus on convergence in expectation, whereas trajectory-wise almost sure convergence is clearly important to ensure that any instantiation of…

We study to what extent may stochastic gradient descent (SGD) be understood as a "conventional" learning rule that achieves generalization performance by obtaining a good fit to training data. We consider the fundamental stochastic convex…

In this work, we provide a fundamental unified convergence theorem used for deriving expected and almost sure convergence results for a series of stochastic optimization methods. Our unified theorem only requires to verify several…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a workhorse algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems in data science and machine learning. Understanding the convergence of SGD is hence of fundamental importance. In this work we examine…

Low-precision training has become crucial for reducing the computational and memory costs of large-scale deep learning. However, quantizing gradients introduces magnitude shrinkage, which can change how stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…

We introduce a general framework for nonlinear stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for the scenarios when gradient noise exhibits heavy tails. The proposed framework subsumes several popular nonlinearity choices, like clipped, normalized,…

We prove the exact worst-case convergence rate of gradient descent for smooth strongly convex optimization on $\mathbb{R}^d$. Concretely, assuming that the objective function $f$ is $\mu$-strongly convex and $L$-smooth, we identify the…

Conjugate gradient (CG) methods are a class of important methods for solving linear equations and nonlinear optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a new stochastic CG algorithm with variance reduction and we prove its linear…

We prove convergence of a single time-scale stochastic subgradient method with subgradient averaging for constrained problems with a nonsmooth and nonconvex objective function having the property of generalized differentiability. As a tool…