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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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-06 Benjamin Grimmer

We study nonconvex stochastic optimization under the Blum-Gladyshev ($\mathsf{BG}$-0) noise model, where the stochastic gradient variance grows quadratically with the distance from the initialization. We consider this problem under both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Antesh Upadhyay , Arda Fazla , Abolfazl Hashemi

Overshoot is a novel, momentum-based stochastic gradient descent optimization method designed to enhance performance beyond standard and Nesterov's momentum. In conventional momentum methods, gradients from previous steps are aggregated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Jakub Kopal , Michal Gregor , Santiago de Leon-Martinez , Jakub Simko

In this report, we study decentralized stochastic optimization to minimize a sum of smooth and strongly convex cost functions when the functions are distributed over a directed network of nodes. In contrast to the existing work, we use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-24 Muhammad I. Qureshi , Ran Xin , Soummya Kar , Usman A. Khan

We propose a family of optimization methods that achieve linear convergence using first-order gradient information and constant step sizes on a class of convex functions much larger than the smooth and strongly convex ones. This larger…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-14 Chris J. Maddison , Daniel Paulin , Yee Whye Teh , Brendan O'Donoghue , Arnaud Doucet

In this paper, we study a class of deterministically constrained stochastic optimization problems. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-stochastic stationary point, where the expected violations of both constraints and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-03 Zhaosong Lu , Sanyou Mei , Yifeng Xiao

We develop universal gradient methods for Stochastic Convex Optimization (SCO). Our algorithms automatically adapt not only to the oracle's noise but also to the H\"older smoothness of the objective function without a priori knowledge of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-12 Anton Rodomanov , Ali Kavis , Yongtao Wu , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Volkan Cevher

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-21 Fabio Nobile , Matteo Raviola , Nathan Schaeffer

It is well known that both gradient descent and stochastic coordinate descent achieve a global convergence rate of $O(1/k)$ in the objective value, when applied to a scheme for minimizing a Lipschitz-continuously differentiable,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-15 Ching-pei Lee , Stephen J. Wright

We present and analyze a momentum-based gradient method for training linear classifiers with an exponentially-tailed loss (e.g., the exponential or logistic loss), which maximizes the classification margin on separable data at a rate of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Ziwei Ji , Nathan Srebro , Matus Telgarsky

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-06 Zhongruo Wang , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Shiqian Ma , Meisam Razaviyayn

Large-scale constrained optimization problems are at the core of many tasks in control, signal processing, and machine learning. Notably, problems with functional constraints arise when, beyond a performance{\nobreakdash-}centric goal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-15 Antesh Upadhyay , Sang Bin Moon , Abolfazl Hashemi

In this work, we introduce an asynchronous decentralized accelerated stochastic gradient descent type of method for decentralized stochastic optimization, considering communication and synchronization are the major bottlenecks. We establish…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-26 Guanghui Lan , Yi Zhou

Stochastic gradient methods have been a popular and powerful choice of optimization methods, aimed at minimizing functions. Their advantage lies in the fact that that one approximates the gradient as opposed to using the full Jacobian…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-09-26 Neil K. Chada , Philip J. Herbert

Selecting an effective step-size is a fundamental challenge in first-order optimization, especially for problems with non-Euclidean geometries. This paper presents a novel adaptive step-size strategy for optimization algorithms that rely on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Abbas Khademi , Antonio Silveti-Falls

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Da Li , Jingjing Wu , Qingrun Zhang

Variance reduction has emerged in recent years as a strong competitor to stochastic gradient descent in non-convex problems, providing the first algorithms to improve upon the converge rate of stochastic gradient descent for finding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-23 Ashok Cutkosky , Francesco Orabona

The stochastic proximal gradient method is a powerful generalization of the widely used stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and has found numerous applications in Machine Learning. However, it is notoriously known that this method…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-10 Yuan Gao , Anton Rodomanov , Sebastian U. Stich

When implementing the gradient descent method in low precision, the employment of stochastic rounding schemes helps to prevent stagnation of convergence caused by the vanishing gradient effect. Unbiased stochastic rounding yields zero bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Lu Xia , Stefano Massei , Michiel E. Hochstenbach , Barry Koren

We analyze the global and local behavior of gradient-like flows under stochastic errors towards the aim of solving convex optimization problems with noisy gradient input. We first study the unconstrained differentiable convex case, using a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Jalal Fadili , Hedy Attouch