Related papers: Unified Analysis of Stochastic Gradient Methods fo…
We study a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems in which the objective is a sum of two functions: One function is the average of a large number of differentiable functions, while the other function is proper, lower…
We present a unified framework for analyzing local SGD methods in the convex and strongly convex regimes for distributed/federated training of supervised machine learning models. We recover several known methods as a special case of our…
In this paper, we consider constrained optimization problems with convex, smooth objective and constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called the Stochastic Moving Ball Approximation (SMBA) method, to solve this class…
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…
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…
Nonconvex-concave (NC-C) finite-sum minimax problems have wide applications in signal processing and machine learning tasks. Conventional stochastic gradient algorithms, which rely on uniform sampling for gradient estimation, often suffer…
In this work, we describe a generic approach to show convergence with high probability for both stochastic convex and non-convex optimization with sub-Gaussian noise. In previous works for convex optimization, either the convergence is only…
This note provides a novel, simple analysis of the method of conjugate gradients for the minimization of convex quadratic functions. In contrast with standard arguments, our proof is entirely self-contained and does not rely on the…
In this work we consider the stochastic minimization of nonsmooth convex loss functions, a central problem in machine learning. We propose a novel algorithm called Accelerated Nonsmooth Stochastic Gradient Descent (ANSGD), which exploits…
We study the worst-case convergence rates of the proximal gradient method for minimizing the sum of a smooth strongly convex function and a non-smooth convex function whose proximal operator is available. We establish the exact worst-case…
We propose a new family of subgradient- and gradient-based methods which converges with optimal complexity for convex optimization problems whose feasible region is simple enough. This includes cases where the objective function is…
We propose a new stochastic proximal quasi-Newton method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions in the particular context that one of the functions is the average of a large number of smooth functions and the other one is nonsmooth.…
In this paper, we first reinvestigate the convergence of vanilla SGD method in the sense of $L^2$ under more general learning rates conditions and a more general convex assumption, which relieves the conditions on learning rates and do not…
In this paper, we propose a novel kernel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for large-scale supervised learning with general losses. Compared to traditional kernel SGD, our algorithm improves efficiency and scalability through an…
This paper considers a distributed stochastic strongly convex optimization, where agents connected over a network aim to cooperatively minimize the average of all agents' local cost functions. Due to the stochasticity of gradient estimation…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…
In this paper we study the problem of minimizing the average of a large number ($n$) of smooth convex loss functions. We propose a new method, S2GD (Semi-Stochastic Gradient Descent), which runs for one or several epochs in each of which a…
We survey incremental methods for minimizing a sum $\sum_{i=1}^mf_i(x)$ consisting of a large number of convex component functions $f_i$. Our methods consist of iterations applied to single components, and have proved very effective in…
We study Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with diminishing step sizes for convex objective functions. We introduce a definitional framework and theory that defines and characterizes a core property, called curvature, of convex objective…
We study the convergence of accelerated stochastic gradient descent for strongly convex objectives under the growth condition, which states that the variance of stochastic gradient is bounded by a multiplicative part that grows with the…