Related papers: Fast Stochastic Ordinal Embedding with Variance Re…
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…
Minimizing sum of two functions under a linear constraint is what we called splitting problem. This convex optimization has wide applications in machine learning problems, such as Lasso, Group Lasso and Sparse logistic regression. A recent…
We consider stochastic approximation with block-coordinate stepsizes and propose adaptive stepsize rules that aim to minimize the expected distance from the next iterate to an (unknown) target point. These stepsize rules employ online…
In this paper, we consider both first- and second-order techniques to address continuous optimization problems arising in machine learning. In the first-order case, we propose a framework of transition from deterministic or…
Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…
A challenging problem in decentralized optimization is to develop algorithms with fast convergence on random and time varying topologies under unreliable and bandwidth-constrained communication network. This paper studies a stochastic…
StochAstic Recursive grAdient algoritHm (SARAH), originally proposed for convex optimization and also proven to be effective for general nonconvex optimization, has received great attention due to its simple recursive framework for updating…
Gradient optimization algorithms using epochs, that is those based on stochastic gradient descent without replacement (SGDo), are predominantly used to train machine learning models in practice. However, the mathematical theory of SGDo and…
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…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…
Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population respond to a deployed classifier by manipulating their features…
In this paper we study a family of variance reduction methods with randomized batch size---at each step, the algorithm first randomly chooses the batch size and then selects a batch of samples to conduct a variance-reduced stochastic…
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…
Stochastic approximation (SA) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms are work-horses for modern machine learning algorithms. Their constant stepsize variants are preferred in practice due to fast convergence behavior. However,…
This paper addresses the problem of optimizing partition functions in a stochastic learning setting. We propose a stochastic variant of the bound majorization algorithm that relies on upper-bounding the partition function with a quadratic…
Motivated by applications arising from large scale optimization and machine learning, we consider stochastic quasi-Newton (SQN) methods for solving unconstrained convex optimization problems. The convergence analysis of the SQN methods,…
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 unified algorithm for stochastic optimization that makes use of a "momentum" term; in other words, the stochastic gradient depends not only on the current true gradient of the objective function, but also on the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for strongly convex functions converges at the rate $\bO(1/k)$. However, achieving good results in practice requires tuning the parameters (for example the learning rate) of the algorithm. In this paper we…
We provide the first theoretical analysis on the convergence rate of the asynchronous stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) descent algorithm on non-convex optimization. Recent studies have shown that the asynchronous stochastic…