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We propose a new variant of AMSGrad, a popular adaptive gradient based optimization algorithm widely used for training deep neural networks. Our algorithm adds prior knowledge about the sequence of consecutive mini-batch gradients and…
In this paper, we propose a new way to obtain optimal convergence rates for smooth stochastic (strong) convex optimization tasks. Our approach is based on results for optimization tasks where gradients have nonrandom noise. In contrast to…
We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…
Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization…
Gradient-based minimax optimal algorithms have greatly promoted the development of continuous optimization and machine learning. One seminal work due to Yurii Nesterov [Nes83a] established $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{L/\mu})$ gradient…
We lower bound the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm at most $\epsilon$) using stochastic first-order methods. In a well-studied model where algorithms access smooth, potentially non-convex functions…
The study of optimal control problems under uncertainty plays an important role in scientific numerical simulations. This class of optimization problems is strongly utilized in engineering, biology and finance. In this paper, a stochastic…
We develop a new primitive for stochastic optimization: a low-bias, low-cost estimator of the minimizer $x_\star$ of any Lipschitz strongly-convex function. In particular, we use a multilevel Monte-Carlo approach due to Blanchet and Glynn…
A recent breakthrough in nonconvex optimization is the online-to-nonconvex conversion framework of [Cutkosky et al., 2023], which reformulates the task of finding an $\varepsilon$-first-order stationary point as an online learning problem.…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…
We adapt recent tools developed for the analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in non-convex optimization to obtain convergence and sample complexity guarantees for the vanilla policy gradient (PG). Our only assumptions are that the…
We propose the stochastic average gradient (SAG) method for optimizing the sum of a finite number of smooth convex functions. Like stochastic gradient (SG) methods, the SAG method's iteration cost is independent of the number of terms in…
This paper presents an auto-conditioned proximal gradient method for nonconvex optimization. The method determines the stepsize using an estimation of local curvature and does not require any prior knowledge of problem parameters and any…
We investigate stochastic Bregman proximal gradient (SBPG) methods for minimizing a finite-sum nonconvex function $\Psi(x):=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^nf_i(x)+\phi(x)$, where $\phi$ is convex and nonsmooth, while $f_i$, instead of gradient…
We study computational and statistical consequences of problem geometry in stochastic and online optimization. By focusing on constraint set and gradient geometry, we characterize the problem families for which stochastic- and…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are important and challenging for statistics and machine learning. In this paper, we propose Projected Proximal Gradient Descent (PPGD) which solves a class of nonconvex and nonsmooth…
Stochastic gradient methods for minimizing nonconvex composite objective functions typically rely on the Lipschitz smoothness of the differentiable part, but this assumption fails in many important problem classes like quadratic inverse…
In this paper, we consider a class of finite-sum convex optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of $m$ ($\ge 1$) smooth components together with some other relatively simple terms. We first introduce a…
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to speed-up the convergence of accelerated proximal gradient (APG) methods. In order to minimize a convex function $f(\mathbf{x})$, our algorithm introduces a simple line search step after each…
Motivated by penalized likelihood maximization in complex models, we study optimization problems where neither the function to optimize nor its gradient have an explicit expression, but its gradient can be approximated by a Monte Carlo…