Related papers: Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent: Nonconvex…
In this paper, we investigate the theoretical properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for statistical inference in the context of nonconvex optimization problems, which have been relatively unexplored compared to convex settings.…
The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…
We propose perturbed proximal algorithms that can provably escape strict saddles for nonsmooth weakly convex functions. The main results are based on a novel characterization of $\epsilon$-approximate local minimum for nonsmooth functions,…
The performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) depends critically on how learning rates are tuned and decreased over time. We propose a method to automatically adjust multiple learning rates so as to minimize the expected error at any…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…
Distributed machine learning has been widely studied in the literature to scale up machine learning model training in the presence of an ever-increasing amount of data. We study distributed machine learning from another perspective, where…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…
Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a popular parallel optimization algorithm in machine learning. Most theoretical analysis on ASGD take a discrete view and prove upper bounds for their convergence rates. However, the…
This paper studies the convergence of clipped stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms with decision-dependent data distribution. Our setting is motivated by privacy preserving optimization algorithms that interact with performative…
Distributed consensus optimization has received considerable attention in recent years; several distributed consensus-based algorithms have been proposed for (nonsmooth) convex and (smooth) nonconvex objective functions. However, the…
Multi-layer neural networks are among the most powerful models in machine learning, yet the fundamental reasons for this success defy mathematical understanding. Learning a neural network requires to optimize a non-convex high-dimensional…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
Most algorithms for solving optimization problems or finding saddle points of convex-concave functions are fixed-point algorithms. In this work we consider the generic problem of finding a fixed point of an average of operators, or an…
We analyze a batched variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with weighted sampling distribution for smooth and non-smooth objective functions. We show that by distributing the batches computationally, a significant speedup in the…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become popular for solving large scale supervised machine learning optimization problems such as SVM, due to their strong theoretical guarantees. While the closely related Dual Coordinate Ascent (DCA)…
Optimizing non-convex functions is of primary importance in the vast majority of machine learning algorithms. Even though many gradient descent based algorithms have been studied, successive convex approximation based algorithms have been…
We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of first-order methods for escaping strict saddle points in smooth non-convex optimization. Our main contribution is a Perturbed Saddle-escape Descent (PSD) algorithm with fully explicit…
We consider distributed convex-concave saddle point problems over arbitrary connected undirected networks and propose a decentralized distributed algorithm for their solution. The local functions distributed across the nodes are assumed to…
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…