Related papers: Better Theory for SGD in the Nonconvex World
Recent works have shown that high probability metrics with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibit informativeness and in some cases advantage over the commonly adopted mean-square error-based ones. In this work we provide a formal…
Many relevant problems in the area of systems and control, such as controller synthesis, observer design and model reduction, can be viewed as optimization problems involving dynamical systems: for instance, maximizing performance in the…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
The non-asymptotic analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) typically yields bounds that decompose into a bias term and a variance term. In this work, we focus on the bias component and study the extent to which SGD can match the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a prevalent optimization technique for large-scale distributed machine learning. While SGD computation can be efficiently divided between multiple machines, communication typically becomes a bottleneck…
Distributed optimization plays an important role in modern large-scale machine learning and data processing systems by optimizing the utilization of computational resources. One of the classical and popular approaches is Local Stochastic…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…
While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…
The success of deep learning has led to a rising interest in the generalization property of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, and stability is one popular approach to study it. Existing works based on stability have studied…
We study diffusion and consensus based optimization of a sum of unknown convex objective functions over distributed networks. The only access to these functions is through stochastic gradient oracles, each of which is only available at a…
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 paper, we investigate the non-asymptotic stationary convergence behavior of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) for nonconvex optimization. We focus on a general class of nonconvex nonsmooth stochastic optimization problems, in which…
Much of the existing theory on first-order non-smooth optimization is built on a restrictive assumption that the gradients of the objective function are uniformly bounded. We introduce a much more realistic class of generalized Lipschitz…
In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…
Motivated by the problem of online canonical correlation analysis, we propose the \emph{Stochastic Scaled-Gradient Descent} (SSGD) algorithm for minimizing the expectation of a stochastic function over a generic Riemannian manifold. SSGD…
We aim to make stochastic gradient descent (SGD) adaptive to (i) the noise $\sigma^2$ in the stochastic gradients and (ii) problem-dependent constants. When minimizing smooth, strongly-convex functions with condition number $\kappa$, we…
Classical assumptions like strong convexity and Lipschitz smoothness often fail to capture the nature of deep learning optimization problems, which are typically non-convex and non-smooth, making traditional analyses less applicable. This…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a promising method for solving large-scale inverse problems, due to its excellent scalability with respect to data size. In this work, we analyze a new data-driven regularized stochastic gradient descent…