Related papers: Single-Timescale Stochastic Nonconvex-Concave Opti…
Variance reduction has emerged in recent years as a strong competitor to stochastic gradient descent in non-convex problems, providing the first algorithms to improve upon the converge rate of stochastic gradient descent for finding…
Alternating gradient-descent-ascent (AltGDA) is an optimization algorithm that has been widely used for model training in various machine learning applications, which aims to solve a nonconvex minimax optimization problem. However, the…
This paper considers the problem of asynchronous stochastic nonconvex optimization with heavy-tailed gradient noise and arbitrarily heterogeneous computation times across workers. We propose an asynchronous normalized stochastic gradient…
Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) have been extensively used for solving stochastic problems or large-scale machine learning problems. Recent works employ various techniques to improve the convergence rate of SGMs for both convex and…
We propose new continuous-time formulations for first-order stochastic optimization algorithms such as mini-batch gradient descent and variance-reduced methods. We exploit these continuous-time models, together with simple Lyapunov analysis…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
Asynchronous algorithms have attracted much attention recently due to the crucial demands on solving large-scale optimization problems. However, the accelerated versions of asynchronous algorithms are rarely studied. In this paper, we…
In this work we investigate stochastic non-convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth loss functions, and the goal is to find an approximate stationary point. The most popular approach to handling such…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
Multi-step temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it unifies one-step TD learning with Monte Carlo methods in a way where intermediate algorithms can outperform either extreme. They address…
Interesting theoretical associations have been established by recent papers between the fields of active learning and stochastic convex optimization due to the common role of feedback in sequential querying mechanisms. In this paper, we…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
Bilevel optimization is an important class of optimization problems where one optimization problem is nested within another. While various methods have emerged to address unconstrained general bilevel optimization problems, there has been a…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
Variance reduction techniques have been successfully applied to temporal-difference (TD) learning and help to improve the sample complexity in policy evaluation. However, the existing work applied variance reduction to either the less…
Block coordinate descent methods and stochastic subgradient methods have been extensively studied in optimization and machine learning. By combining randomized block sampling with stochastic subgradient methods based on dual averaging, we…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
We provide a unified analysis of two-timescale gradient descent ascent (TTGDA) for solving structured nonconvex minimax optimization problems in the form of $\min_\textbf{x} \max_{\textbf{y} \in Y} f(\textbf{x}, \textbf{y})$, where the…
We focus on analyzing the classical stochastic projected gradient methods under a general dependent data sampling scheme for constrained smooth nonconvex optimization. We show the worst-case rate of convergence $\tilde{O}(t^{-1/4})$ and…
We propose a novel single-loop decentralized algorithm called DGDA-VR for solving the stochastic nonconvex strongly-concave minimax problem over a connected network of $M$ agents. By using stochastic first-order oracles to estimate the…