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Surprisingly, recent work has shown that gradient descent can be accelerated without using momentum -- just by judiciously choosing stepsizes. An open question raised by several papers is whether this phenomenon of stepsize-based…
Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…
Conditional stochastic optimization covers a variety of applications ranging from invariant learning and causal inference to meta-learning. However, constructing unbiased gradient estimators for such problems is challenging due to the…
We consider double-regularized nonconvex-strongly concave (NCSC) minimax problems of the form $(P):\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}} \max_{y\in\mathcal{Y}}g(x)+f(x,y)-h(y)$, where $g$, $h$ are closed convex, $f$ is $L$-smooth in $(x,y)$ and strongly…
This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…
We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…
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…
Minimax problems, such as generative adversarial network, adversarial training, and fair training, are widely solved by a multi-step gradient descent ascent (MGDA) method in practice. However, its convergence guarantee is limited. In this…
Minimax optimization plays an important role in many machine learning tasks such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and adversarial training. Although recently a wide variety of optimization methods have been proposed to solve the…
Stochastic minimax optimization on Riemannian manifolds has recently attracted significant attention due to its broad range of applications, such as robust training of neural networks and robust maximum likelihood estimation. Existing…
We propose a simple, scalable, and fast gradient descent algorithm to optimize a nonconvex objective for the rank minimization problem and a closely related family of semidefinite programs. With $O(r^3 \kappa^2 n \log n)$ random…
Gradient descent ascent (GDA), the simplest single-loop algorithm for nonconvex minimax optimization, is widely used in practical applications such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and adversarial training. Albeit its desirable…
In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…
To efficiently manage serverless computing platforms, a key aspect is the auto-scaling of services, i.e., the set of computational resources allocated to a service adapts over time as a function of the traffic demand. The objective is to…
We study stochastic algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems with a convex yet possibly nonsmooth regularizer, which find wide applications in many practical machine learning applications. However, compared to asynchronous…
We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…
We design a stochastic algorithm to train any smooth neural network to $\varepsilon$-approximate local minima, using $O(\varepsilon^{-3.25})$ backpropagations. The best result was essentially $O(\varepsilon^{-4})$ by SGD. More broadly, it…