Related papers: Distributed Gradient Methods for Nonconvex Optimiz…
This note studies the distributed non-convex optimization problem with non-smooth regularization, which has wide applications in decentralized learning, estimation and control. The objective function is the sum of different local objective…
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.…
Decentralized optimization is a promising parallel computation paradigm for large-scale data analytics and machine learning problems defined over a network of nodes. This paper is concerned with decentralized non-convex composite problems…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient…
It is well-known that the reparameterisation gradient estimator, which exhibits low variance in practice, is biased for non-differentiable models. This may compromise correctness of gradient-based optimisation methods such as stochastic…
We consider decentralized gradient-free optimization of minimizing Lipschitz continuous functions that satisfy neither smoothness nor convexity assumption. We propose two novel gradient-free algorithms, the Decentralized Gradient-Free…
Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a standard way to exploit heterogeneous compute resources in distributed learning: instead of forcing fast workers to wait for slow ones, the server updates the model whenever a gradient…
In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…
The vulnerability of deep neural networks to small and even imperceptible perturbations has become a central topic in deep learning research. Although several sophisticated defense mechanisms have been introduced, most were later shown to…
This paper considers a general data-fitting problem over a networked system, in which many computing nodes are connected by an undirected graph. This kind of problem can find many real-world applications and has been studied extensively in…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…
Global minimization is a fundamental challenge in optimization, especially in machine learning, where finding the global minimum of a function directly impacts model performance and convergence. This article introduces a novel optimization…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an out-of-equilibrium algorithm used extensively to train artificial neural networks. However very little is known on to what extent SGD is crucial for to the success of this technology and, in…
Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…
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…
In this paper, we study distributed stochastic optimization to minimize a sum of smooth and strongly-convex local cost functions over a network of agents, communicating over a strongly-connected graph. Assuming that each agent has access to…
We propose a projected semi-stochastic gradient descent method with mini-batch for improving both the theoretical complexity and practical performance of the general stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). We are able to prove linear…
We develop and analyze an asynchronous algorithm for distributed convex optimization when the objective writes a sum of smooth functions, local to each worker, and a non-smooth function. Unlike many existing methods, our distributed…
Variance reduction (VR) methods boost the performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by enabling the use of larger, constant stepsizes and preserving linear convergence rates. However, current variance reduced SGD methods require…
Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…