Related papers: On Convergence-Diagnostic based Step Sizes for Sto…
The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…
Projected policy gradient (PPG) is a basic policy optimization method in reinforcement learning. Given access to exact policy evaluations, previous studies have established the sublinear convergence of PPG for sufficiently small step sizes…
The purpose of this manuscript is to derive new convergence results for several subgradient methods applied to minimizing nonsmooth convex functions with H\"olderian growth. The growth condition is satisfied in many applications and…
We propose a new framework, inspired by random matrix theory, for analyzing the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when both number of samples and dimensions are large. This framework applies to any fixed stepsize and the finite…
Stochastic gradient descent (\textsc{Sgd}) methods are the most powerful optimization tools in training machine learning and deep learning models. Moreover, acceleration (a.k.a. momentum) methods and diagonal scaling (a.k.a. adaptive…
Modern machine learning focuses on highly expressive models that are able to fit or interpolate the data completely, resulting in zero training loss. For such models, we show that the stochastic gradients of common loss functions satisfy a…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for minimizing objective functions that arise in machine learning. For constant step-sized SGD, the iterates form a Markov chain on a general state space. Focusing on a class of…
We propose a general framework for distributed stochastic optimization under delayed gradient models. In this setting, $n$ local agents leverage their own data and computation to assist a central server in minimizing a global objective…
A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…
We consider the least-squares regression problem and provide a detailed asymptotic analysis of the performance of averaged constant-step-size stochastic gradient descent (a.k.a. least-mean-squares). In the strongly-convex case, we provide…
We introduce a novel dynamic learning-rate scheduling scheme grounded in theory with the goal of simplifying the manual and time-consuming tuning of schedules in practice. Our approach is based on estimating the locally-optimal stepsize,…
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…
Scalable algorithms of posterior approximation allow Bayesian nonparametrics such as Dirichlet process mixture to scale up to larger dataset at fractional cost. Recent algorithms, notably the stochastic variational inference performs local…
We present a novel method for frequentist statistical inference in $M$-estimation problems, based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a fixed step size: we demonstrate that the average of such SGD sequences can be used for statistical…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular optimization method which has been applied to many important machine learning tasks such as Support Vector Machines and Deep Neural Networks. In order to parallelize SGD, minibatch training is…
We analyze the constant step size subgradient method on nonsmooth, nonconvex functions. We identify geometric assumptions on the objective function under which i) its domain admits a partition (stratification) into smooth manifolds (strata)…
In view of a direct and simple improvement of vanilla SGD, this paper presents a fine-tuning of its step-sizes in the mini-batch case. For doing so, one estimates curvature, based on a local quadratic model and using only noisy gradient…
In this book chapter, we briefly describe the main components that constitute the gradient descent method and its accelerated and stochastic variants. We aim at explaining these components from a mathematical point of view, including…
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…
SGD with momentum (SGDM) has been widely applied in many machine learning tasks, and it is often applied with dynamic stepsizes and momentum weights tuned in a stagewise manner. Despite of its empirical advantage over SGD, the role of…