Related papers: Variable Metric Proximal Gradient Method with Diag…
In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…
We consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In the context of most machine learning applications, each loss function is non-negative and thus can be expressed as the…
The MM principle is a device for creating optimization algorithms satisfying the ascent or descent property. The current survey emphasizes the role of the MM principle in nonlinear programming. For smooth functions, one can construct an…
This paper presents a new variable selection approach integrated with Gaussian process (GP) regression. We consider a sparse projection of input variables and a general stationary covariance model that depends on the Euclidean distance…
Establishing a fast rate of convergence for optimization methods is crucial to their applicability in practice. With the increasing popularity of deep learning over the past decade, stochastic gradient descent and its adaptive variants…
Variable selection in Gaussian processes (GPs) is typically undertaken by thresholding the inverse lengthscales of automatic relevance determination kernels, but in high-dimensional datasets this approach can be unreliable. A more…
Stochastic gradient descent (\textsc{Sgd}) methods are the most powerful optimization tools in training machine learning and deep learning models. Moreover, acceleration (a.k.a. momentum) methods and diagonal scaling (a.k.a. adaptive…
Gradient boosting is a prediction method that iteratively combines weak learners to produce a complex and accurate model. From an optimization point of view, the learning procedure of gradient boosting mimics a gradient descent on a…
In this paper, we study a class of fractional optimization problems, in which the numerator of the objective is the sum of a convex function and a differentiable function with a Lipschitz continuous gradient, while the denominator is a…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
The limited memory steepest descent method (LMSD) proposed by Fletcher is an extension of the Barzilai-Borwein "two-point step size" strategy for steepest descent methods for solving unconstrained optimization problems. It is known that the…
This paper considers unconstrained convex optimization problems with time-varying objective functions. We propose algorithms with a discrete time-sampling scheme to find and track the solution trajectory based on prediction and correction…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms (MCMC) are popular algorithms for Bayesian sampling in the presence of large datasets. However, they come with little theoretical guarantees and assessing their empirical…
We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of \emph{heterogeneous} functions distributed across several machines with a focus on communication efficiency. In such settings, naively using the classical stochastic…
The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a versatile tool for solving a wide range of constrained optimization problems, with differentiable or non-differentiable objective functions. Unfortunately, its performance is…
Variational Optimization forms a differentiable upper bound on an objective. We show that approaches such as Natural Evolution Strategies and Gaussian Perturbation, are special cases of Variational Optimization in which the expectations are…
The Primal-Dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) method is a powerful optimization scheme that breaks complex problems into simple sub-steps. Unfortunately, PDHG methods require the user to choose stepsize parameters, and the speed of convergence is…
Recent studies have shown that proximal gradient (PG) method and accelerated gradient method (APG) with restarting can enjoy a linear convergence under a weaker condition than strong convexity, namely a quadratic growth condition (QGC).…
We study convergence rates of the classic proximal bundle method for a variety of nonsmooth convex optimization problems. We show that, without any modification, this algorithm adapts to converge faster in the presence of smoothness or a…
We propose an inexact variable-metric proximal point algorithm to accelerate gradient-based optimization algorithms. The proposed scheme, called QNing can be notably applied to incremental first-order methods such as the stochastic…