Related papers: Using gradient directions to get global convergenc…
Optimization techniques are of great importance to effectively and efficiently train a deep neural network (DNN). It has been shown that using the first and second order statistics (e.g., mean and variance) to perform Z-score…
Most existing work uses dual decomposition and subgradient methods to solve Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problems in a distributed manner, which suffer from slow rate of convergence properties. This work develops an alternative…
We introduce a new Swarm-Based Gradient Descent (SBGD) method for non-convex optimization. The swarm consists of agents, each is identified with a position, ${\mathbf x}$, and mass, $m$. The key to their dynamics is communication: masses…
The question of how to parallelize the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method has received much attention in the literature. In this paper, we focus instead on batch methods that use a sizeable fraction of the training set at each…
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…
The goal of this paper is to study approaches to bridge the gap between first-order and second-order type methods for composite convex programs. Our key observations are: i) Many well-known operator splitting methods, such as…
While there has been a significant amount of work studying gradient descent techniques for non-convex optimization problems over the last few years, all existing results establish either local convergence with good rates or global…
Gradients have been exploited in proposal distributions to accelerate the convergence of Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms on discrete distributions. However, these methods require a natural differentiable extension of the target discrete…
Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…
This paper proposes a thorough theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with non-increasing step sizes. First, we show that the recursion defining SGD can be provably approximated by solutions of a time inhomogeneous…
In this paper, we propose a first second-order scheme based on arbitrary non-Euclidean norms, incorporated by Bregman distances. They are introduced directly in the Newton iterate with regularization parameter proportional to the square…
Deep learning involves a difficult non-convex optimization problem, which is often solved by stochastic gradient (SG) methods. While SG is usually effective, it may not be robust in some situations. Recently, Newton methods have been…
We consider the problem of denoising with the help of prior information taken from a database of clean signals or images. Denoising with variational methods is very efficient if a regularizer well adapted to the nature of the data is…
We present a family of algorithms, called descent algorithms, for optimizing convex and non-convex functions. We also introduce a new first-order algorithm, called rescaled gradient descent (RGD), and show that RGD achieves a faster…
It has been observed in a variety of contexts that gradient descent methods have great success in solving low-rank matrix factorization problems, despite the relevant problem formulation being non-convex. We tackle a particular instance of…
We consider the minimization of non-convex quadratic forms regularized by a cubic term, which exhibit multiple saddle points and poor local minima. Nonetheless, we prove that, under mild assumptions, gradient descent approximates the…
There has been a growing effort in studying the distributed optimization problem over a network. The objective is to optimize a global function formed by a sum of local functions, using only local computation and communication. Literature…
One of the most common methods to train machine learning algorithms today is the stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In a distributed setting, SGD-based algorithms have been shown to converge theoretically under specific circumstances. A…
Newton method is one of the most powerful methods for finding solutions of nonlinear equations and for proving their existence. In its "pure" form it has fast convergence near the solution, but small convergence domain. On the other hand…
In this paper, we propose a method of distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD), with low communication load and computational complexity, and still fast convergence. To reduce the communication load, at each iteration of the algorithm,…