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We study optimization algorithms based on variance reduction for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Remarkable recent progress has been made in this direction through development of algorithms like SAG, SVRG, SAGA. These algorithms have…
Motivated by broad applications in reinforcement learning and machine learning, this paper considers the popular stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when the gradients of the underlying objective function are sampled from Markov processes.…
SGD with Momentum (SGDM) is a widely used family of algorithms for large-scale optimization of machine learning problems. Yet, when optimizing generic convex functions, no advantage is known for any SGDM algorithm over plain SGD. Moreover,…
Despite the strong theoretical guarantees that variance-reduced finite-sum optimization algorithms enjoy, their applicability remains limited to cases where the memory overhead they introduce (SAG/SAGA), or the periodic full gradient…
Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is attractive from a speed perspective because workers do not wait for synchronization. However, the Transformer model converges poorly with asynchronous SGD, resulting in substantially lower…
We consider the stochastic variational inequality problem in which the map is expectation-valued in a component-wise sense. Much of the available convergence theory and rate statements for stochastic approximation schemes are limited to…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for strongly convex functions converges at the rate $\bO(1/k)$. However, achieving good results in practice requires tuning the parameters (for example the learning rate) of the algorithm. In this paper we…
Epoch gradient descent method (a.k.a. Epoch-GD) proposed by Hazan and Kale (2011) was deemed a breakthrough for stochastic strongly convex minimization, which achieves the optimal convergence rate of $O(1/T)$ with $T$ iterative updates for…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
Stein discrepancies (SDs) monitor convergence and non-convergence in approximate inference when exact integration and sampling are intractable. However, the computation of a Stein discrepancy can be prohibitive if the Stein operator - often…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are widely used and highly effective optimization methods in machine learning, especially for neural network training. By using a single datum or a small subset of the data, selected…
In this note we give a simple proof for the convergence of stochastic gradient (SGD) methods on $\mu$-convex functions under a (milder than standard) $L$-smoothness assumption. We show that for carefully chosen stepsizes SGD converges after…
Sign stochastic gradient descent (signSGD) is a communication-efficient method that transmits only the sign of stochastic gradients for parameter updating. Existing literature has demonstrated that signSGD can achieve a convergence rate of…
We investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…
A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The…
We study convergence rates of AdaGrad-Norm as an exemplar of adaptive stochastic gradient methods (SGD), where the step sizes change based on observed stochastic gradients, for minimizing non-convex, smooth objectives. Despite their…
A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…
It is known that greedy methods perform well for maximizing monotone submodular functions. At the same time, such methods perform poorly in the face of non-monotonicity. In this paper, we show - arguably, surprisingly - that invoking the…
We obtain an improved finite-sample guarantee on the linear convergence of stochastic gradient descent for smooth and strongly convex objectives, improving from a quadratic dependence on the conditioning $(L/\mu)^2$ (where $L$ is a bound on…
In this paper we aim to formally explain the phenomenon of fast convergence of SGD observed in modern machine learning. The key observation is that most modern learning architectures are over-parametrized and are trained to interpolate the…