Related papers: Complexity Guarantees for Polyak Steps with Moment…
Stochastic gradient methods with momentum are widely used in applications and at the core of optimization subroutines in many popular machine learning libraries. However, their sample complexities have not been obtained for problems beyond…
This paper revisits the Polyak step size schedule for convex optimization problems, proving that a simple variant of it simultaneously attains near optimal convergence rates for the gradient descent algorithm, for all ranges of strong…
In this work, we consider smooth unconstrained optimization problems and we deal with the class of gradient methods with momentum, i.e., descent algorithms where the search direction is defined as a linear combination of the current…
Accelerated algorithms for minimizing smooth strongly convex functions usually require knowledge of the strong convexity parameter $\mu$. In the case of an unknown $\mu$, current adaptive techniques are based on restart schemes. When the…
We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…
In this work, we propose an adaptive variation on the classical Heavy-ball method for convex quadratic minimization. The adaptivity crucially relies on so-called "Polyak step-sizes", which consists in using the knowledge of the optimal…
Incorporating a so-called "momentum" dynamic in gradient descent methods is widely used in neural net training as it has been broadly observed that, at least empirically, it often leads to significantly faster convergence. At the same time,…
In this paper, acceleration of gradient methods for convex optimization problems with weak levels of convexity and smoothness is considered. Starting from the universal fast gradient method which was designed to be an optimal method for…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) methods have become fundamental optimization tools in machine learning, combining the computational efficiency of stochastic gradients with the acceleration benefits of momentum. Despite…
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…
In 1963 Boris Polyak suggested a particular step size for gradient descent methods, now known as the Polyak step size, that he later adapted to subgradient methods. The Polyak step size requires knowledge of the optimal value of the…
The Polyak stepsize has been widely used in subgradient methods for non-smooth convex optimization. However, calculating the stepsize requires the optimal value, which is generally unknown. Therefore, dynamic estimations of the optimal…
This paper addresses smooth convexly constrained optimization problems where the Euclidean projection onto the feasible set is computationally tractable. Although momentum techniques like Polyak's heavy-ball are known for accelerating…
In this work, we study online convex optimization with a fixed constraint function $g : \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$. Prior work on this problem has shown $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret and cumulative constraint satisfaction $\sum_{t=1}^{T}…
We focus on the optimization problem with smooth, possibly nonconvex objectives and a convex constraint set for which the Euclidean projection operation is practically available. Focusing on this setting, we carry out a general convergence…
We study accelerated optimization methods in the Gaussian phase retrieval problem. In this setting, we prove that gradient methods with Polyak or Nesterov momentum have similar implicit regularization to gradient descent. This implicit…
We study gradient methods for optimizing $(L_0, L_1)$-smooth functions, a class that generalizes Lipschitz-smooth functions and has gained attention for its relevance in machine learning. We provide new insights into the structure of this…
This work proposes an accelerated first-order algorithm we call the Robust Momentum Method for optimizing smooth strongly convex functions. The algorithm has a single scalar parameter that can be tuned to trade off robustness to gradient…
This note considers the momentum method by Polyak and the accelerated gradient method by Nesterov, both without line search but with fixed step length applied to strictly convex quadratic functions assuming that exact gradients are used and…
In this paper, we revisit a classical adaptive stepsize strategy for gradient descent: the Polyak stepsize (PolyakGD), originally proposed in Polyak (1969). We study the convergence behavior of PolyakGD from two perspectives: tight…