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We propose an algorithm for the adaptation of the learning rate for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that avoids the need for validation set use. The idea for the adaptiveness comes from the technique of extrapolation: to get an estimate…
Policy gradient methods are an appealing approach in reinforcement learning because they directly optimize the cumulative reward and can straightforwardly be used with nonlinear function approximators such as neural networks. The two main…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
This paper presents fault-tolerant asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms. SGD is widely used for approximating the minimum of a cost function $Q$, as a core part of optimization and learning algorithms. Our algorithms…
Motivated by broad applications in machine learning, we study the popular accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) algorithm for solving (possibly nonconvex) optimization problems. We characterize the finite-time performance of this…
Many problems encountered in science and engineering can be formulated as estimating a low-rank object (e.g., matrices and tensors) from incomplete, and possibly corrupted, linear measurements. Through the lens of matrix and tensor…
Learn to Optimize (L2O) trains deep neural network-based solvers for optimization, achieving success in accelerating convex problems and improving non-convex solutions. However, L2O lacks rigorous theoretical backing for its own training…
Adaptive gradient methods, which adopt historical gradient information to automatically adjust the learning rate, despite the nice property of fast convergence, have been observed to generalize worse than stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…
Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…
Sample efficiency is crucial for imitation learning methods to be applicable in real-world applications. Many studies improve sample efficiency by extending adversarial imitation to be off-policy regardless of the fact that these off-policy…
We address the problem of policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes, and provide instance-dependent guarantees on the $\ell_\infty$-error under a generative model. We establish both asymptotic and non-asymptotic versions of…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is almost ubiquitously used for training non-convex optimization tasks. Recently, a hypothesis proposed by Keskar et al. [2017] that large batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers has received…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…
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…
This work considers the problem of decentralized online learning, where the goal is to track the optimum of the sum of time-varying functions, distributed across several nodes in a network. The local availability of the functions and their…
We study statistical inverse learning in the context of nonlinear inverse problems under random design. Specifically, we address a class of nonlinear problems by employing gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with…
Temporal difference learning with linear function approximation is a popular method to obtain a low-dimensional approximation of the value function of a policy in a Markov Decision Process. We give a new interpretation of this method in…
First order optimization algorithms play a major role in large scale machine learning. A new class of methods, called adaptive algorithms, were recently introduced to adjust iteratively the learning rate for each coordinate. Despite great…
We consider decentralized machine learning over a network where the training data is distributed across $n$ agents, each of which can compute stochastic model updates on their local data. The agent's common goal is to find a model that…