Related papers: Solving Stochastic Compositional Optimization is N…
The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…
Probabilistic programming is related to a compositional approach to stochastic modeling by switching from discrete to continuous time dynamics. In continuous time, an operator-algebra semantics is available in which processes proceeding in…
Two of the most prominent algorithms for solving unconstrained smooth games are the classical stochastic gradient descent-ascent (SGDA) and the recently introduced stochastic consensus optimization (SCO) [Mescheder et al., 2017]. SGDA is…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…
This paper studies stochastic optimization for a sum of compositional functions, where the inner-level function of each summand is coupled with the corresponding summation index. We refer to this family of problems as finite-sum coupled…
This paper studies optimization for a family of problems termed $\textbf{compositional entropic risk minimization}$, in which each data's loss is formulated as a Log-Expectation-Exponential (Log-E-Exp) function. The Log-E-Exp formulation…
Stochastic multi-level compositional optimization problems cover many new machine learning paradigms, e.g., multi-step model-agnostic meta-learning, which require efficient optimization algorithms for large-scale data. This paper studies…
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…
In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…
We consider the stochastic nested composition optimization problem where the objective is a composition of two expected-value functions. We proposed the stochastic ADMM to solve this complicated objective. In order to find an $\epsilon$…
We present the SC-ABD algorithm that implements sequentially consistent distributed shared memory (DSM). The algorithm tolerates that less than half of the processes are faulty (crash-stop). Compared to the multi-writer ABD algorithm,…
Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…
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…
Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…
In this paper, we study smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization problems, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions. We assume access to noisy evaluations of the functions and their gradients,…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a prevalent optimization technique for large-scale distributed machine learning. While SGD computation can be efficiently divided between multiple machines, communication typically becomes a bottleneck…
Classical stochastic gradient methods for optimization rely on noisy gradient approximations that become progressively less accurate as iterates approach a solution. The large noise and small signal in the resulting gradients makes it…
This paper considers a class of constrained stochastic composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a certain non-differentiable (but…