Related papers: Using gradient directions to get global convergenc…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is…
Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…
Block coordinate descent is a powerful algorithmic template suitable for big data optimization. This template admits a lot of variants including block gradient descent (BGD), which performs gradient descent on a selected block of variables,…
We propose a new stepsize for the gradient method. It is shown that this new stepsize will converge to the reciprocal of the largest eigenvalue of the Hessian, when Dai-Yang's asymptotic optimal gradient method (Computational Optimization…
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)…
We present a coupled system of ODEs which, when discretized with a constant time step/learning rate, recovers Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent algorithm. The same ODEs, when discretized with a decreasing learning rate, leads to novel…
In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision; however, training DNNs for satisfactory performance remains challenging and suffers from sensitivity to empirical selections of an optimization algorithm for…
We present a convergence rate analysis for biased stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where individual gradient updates are corrupted by computation errors. We develop stochastic quadratic constraints to formulate a small linear matrix…
Optimization techniques are at the core of many scientific and engineering disciplines. The steepest descent methods play a foundational role in this area. In this paper we studied a generalized steepest descent method on Riemannian…
We propose a descent subgradient algorithm for minimizing a real function, assumed to be locally Lipschitz, but not necessarily smooth or convex. To find an effective descent direction, the Goldstein subdifferential is approximated through…
This paper proposes and justifies two globally convergent Newton-type methods to solve unconstrained and constrained problems of nonsmooth optimization by using tools of variational analysis and generalized differentiation. Both methods are…
We investigate a globalized inexact semismooth Newton method applied to strongly convex optimization problems in Hilbert spaces. Here, the semismooth Newton method is appplied to the dual problem, which has a continuously differentiable…
We study level set teleportation, an optimization routine which tries to accelerate gradient descent (GD) by maximizing the gradient norm over a level set of the objective. While teleportation intuitively speeds-up GD via bigger steps,…
We analyze the convergence of a nonlocal gradient descent method for minimizing a class of high-dimensional non-convex functions, where a directional Gaussian smoothing (DGS) is proposed to define the nonlocal gradient (also referred to as…
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…
In this paper, we incorporate the Barzilai-Borwein step size into gradient descent methods used to train deep networks. This allows us to adapt the learning rate using a two-point approximation to the secant equation which quasi-Newton…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…
Training deep neural networks (DNNs) efficiently is a challenge due to the associated highly nonconvex optimization. The backpropagation (backprop) algorithm has long been the most widely used algorithm for gradient computation of…
Thresholding algorithms for sparse optimization problems involve two key components: search directions and thresholding strategies. In this paper, we use the compressed Newton direction as a search direction, derived by confining the…