Related papers: Second-Order Guarantees of Stochastic Gradient Des…
A central challenge to using first-order methods for optimizing nonconvex problems is the presence of saddle points. First-order methods often get stuck at saddle points, greatly deteriorating their performance. Typically, to escape from…
Large-scale non-convex optimization problems are expensive to solve due to computational and memory costs. To reduce the costs, first-order (computationally efficient) and asynchronous-parallel (memory efficient) algorithms are necessary to…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…
Minimax problems of the form $\min_x \max_y \Psi(x,y)$ have attracted increased interest largely due to advances in machine learning, in particular generative adversarial networks. These are typically trained using variants of stochastic…
Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…
Recent works have shown that high probability metrics with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibit informativeness and in some cases advantage over the commonly adopted mean-square error-based ones. In this work we provide a formal…
The Hessian-vector product has been utilized to find a second-order stationary solution with strong complexity guarantee (e.g., almost linear time complexity in the problem's dimensionality). In this paper, we propose to further reduce the…
We provide larger step-size restrictions for which gradient descent based algorithms (almost surely) avoid strict saddle points. In particular, consider a twice differentiable (non-convex) objective function whose gradient has Lipschitz…
We introduce and investigate stochastic processes designed to find local minimizers and saddle points of non-convex functions, exploring the landscape more efficiently than the standard noisy gradient descent. The processes switch between…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…
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 Descent (SGD) is a widely deployed optimization procedure throughout data-driven and simulation-driven disciplines, which has drawn a substantial interest in understanding its global behavior across a broad class of…
Heavy-tailed noise in nonconvex stochastic optimization has garnered increasing research interest, as empirical studies, including those on training attention models, suggest it is a more realistic gradient noise condition. This paper…
Trust region and cubic regularization methods have demonstrated good performance in small scale non-convex optimization, showing the ability to escape from saddle points. Each iteration of these methods involves computation of gradient,…
The rapid progress in machine learning in recent years has been based on a highly productive connection to gradient-based optimization. Further progress hinges in part on a shift in focus from pattern recognition to decision-making and…
A game theory inspired methodology is proposed for finding a function's saddle points. While explicit descent methods are known to have severe convergence issues, implicit methods are natural in an adversarial setting, as they take the…
This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…
This work establishes new convergence guarantees for gradient descent in smooth convex optimization via a computer-assisted analysis technique. Our theory allows nonconstant stepsize policies with frequent long steps potentially violating…
This paper presents a novel stochastic gradient descent algorithm for constrained optimization. The proposed algorithm randomly samples constraints and components of the finite sum objective function and relies on a relaxed logarithmic…