Related papers: A Stochastic Variance Reduced Nesterov's Accelerat…
We present a coupled system of ODEs which, when discretized with a constant time step/learning rate, recovers Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent algorithm. The same ODEs, when discretized with a decreasing learning rate, leads to novel…
Quasi-Newton methods still face significant challenges in training large-scale neural networks due to additional compute costs in the Hessian related computations and instability issues in stochastic training. A well-known method, L-BFGS…
The stochastic momentum method is a commonly used acceleration technique for solving large-scale stochastic optimization problems in artificial neural networks. Current convergence results of stochastic momentum methods under non-convex…
Stochastic variance reduced optimization methods are known to be globally convergent while they suffer from slow local convergence, especially when moderate or high accuracy is needed. To alleviate this problem, we propose an optimization…
The cubic regularized Newton method of Nesterov and Polyak has become increasingly popular for non-convex optimization because of its capability of finding an approximate local solution with second-order guarantee. Several recent works…
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. More precisely, we interpret a large class of…
We consider unconstrained stochastic optimization problems with no available gradient information. Such problems arise in settings from derivative-free simulation optimization to reinforcement learning. We propose an adaptive sampling…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their action selections so as to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms require solving a nonconvex and…
This paper proposes a new family of algorithms for training neural networks (NNs). These are based on recent developments in the field of non-convex optimization, going under the general name of successive convex approximation (SCA)…
In this paper, we develop a new algorithm, Annealed Skewed SGD - AskewSGD - for training deep neural networks (DNNs) with quantized weights. First, we formulate the training of quantized neural networks (QNNs) as a smoothed sequence of…
Stochastic optimization algorithms, particularly stochastic policy gradient (SPG), report significant success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, up to now, that how to speedily acquire an optimal solution for RL is still a…
We consider the development of practical stochastic quasi-Newton, and in particular Kronecker-factored block-diagonal BFGS and L-BFGS methods, for training deep neural networks (DNNs). In DNN training, the number of variables and components…
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have achieved human-level performance on a variety of real-world applications. However, the current algorithms still suffer from poor gradient estimation with excessive variance, resulting in…
Stochastic gradient algorithms have been the main focus of large-scale learning problems and they led to important successes in machine learning. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of learning rate and the amount of the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…
We consider stochastic zero-order optimization problems, which arise in settings from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning. We propose an adaptive sampling quasi-Newton method where we estimate the gradients of a stochastic…
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has driven the demand for more efficient optimization techniques. Among these, the Lookahead family of optimizers employs a two-loop framework, maintaining fast and slow sets of model…
Various distributed gradient descent algorithms for multi-agent optimization have incorporated the Nesterov accelerated gradient method, where the use of momentum enhances convergence rates. These algorithms have found broad applications in…
We present a quasi-Newton method for unconstrained stochastic optimization. Most existing literature on this topic assumes a setting of stochastic optimization in which a finite sum of component functions is a reasonable approximation of an…
Following early work on Hessian-free methods for deep learning, we study a stochastic generalized Gauss-Newton method (SGN) for training DNNs. SGN is a second-order optimization method, with efficient iterations, that we demonstrate to…