Related papers: Improved Zeroth-Order Variance Reduced Algorithms …
Minimizing finite sums of functions is a central problem in optimization, arising in numerous practical applications. Such problems are commonly addressed using first-order optimization methods. However, these procedures cannot be used in…
This paper introduces a novel optimization algorithm designed for nonlinear least-squares problems. The method is derived by preconditioning the gradient descent direction using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the Jacobian. This…
Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…
Variance reduction techniques like SVRG provide simple and fast algorithms for optimizing a convex finite-sum objective. For nonconvex objectives, these techniques can also find a first-order stationary point (with small gradient). However,…
Rank-based zeroth-order (ZO) optimization -- which relies only on the ordering of function evaluations -- offers strong robustness to noise and monotone transformations, and underlies many successful algorithms such as CMA-ES, natural…
In this paper, we focus on solving an important class of nonconvex optimization problems which includes many problems for example signal processing over a networked multi-agent system and distributed learning over networks. Motivated by…
We propose a stochastic trust-region method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization that incorporates stochastic variance-reduced gradients (SVRG) to accelerate convergence. Unlike classical trust-region methods, the proposed algorithm…
Differentially private zeroth-order optimization methods have recently gained popularity in private fine tuning of machine learning models due to their reduced memory requirements. Current approaches for privatizing zeroth-order methods…
We consider a distributed convex optimization problem in a network which is time-varying and not always strongly connected. The local cost function of each node is affected by some stochastic process. All nodes of the network collaborate to…
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…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
In this paper, we present a novel stochastic optimization method, which uses the binary search technique with first order gradient based optimization method, called Binary Search Gradient Optimization (BSG) or BiGrad. In this optimization…
In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for nonconvex-concave minimax problems, which have attracted widely attention in machine learning, signal processing and many other fields in recent years. We propose a zeroth-order…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used optimization methods for parallel and distributed processing of large datasets. One of the key limitations of distributed SGD is the need to regularly communicate the…
In this paper, we consider two distinct challenges in the resolution of nonsmooth stochastic optimization. Of these, the first pertains to the pronounced dependence of dimension in Gaussian smoothing-enabled zeroth-order schemes, impeding…
In this work, we consider a distributed multi-agent stochastic optimization problem, where each agent holds a local objective function that is smooth and convex, and that is subject to a stochastic process. The goal is for all agents to…
Stochastic gradient algorithms estimate the gradient based on only one or a few samples and enjoy low computational cost per iteration. They have been widely used in large-scale optimization problems. However, stochastic gradient algorithms…
The minimax excess risk optimization (MERO) problem is a new variation of the traditional distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem, which achieves uniformly low regret across all test distributions under suitable conditions. In…
In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original SVRG, called variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Unlike the choices of snapshot and starting points in SVRG and its proximal variant, Prox-SVRG, the two vectors…
A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…