Related papers: Linear Convergence of Generalized Mirror Descent w…
We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…
Learning-to-optimize (L2O) is an emerging research area in large-scale optimization with applications in data science. Recently, researchers have proposed a novel L2O framework called learned mirror descent (LMD), based on the classical…
We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems with finite state and action spaces and study the convergence rates of the projected policy gradient method and a general class of policy mirror descent methods, all with…
Adaptive gradient methods are typically used for training over-parameterized models. To better understand their behaviour, we study a simplistic setting -- smooth, convex losses with models over-parameterized enough to interpolate the data.…
When training neural networks with low-precision computation, rounding errors often cause stagnation or are detrimental to the convergence of the optimizers; in this paper we study the influence of rounding errors on the convergence of the…
We consider alternating gradient descent (AGD) with fixed step size applied to the asymmetric matrix factorization objective. We show that, for a rank-$r$ matrix $\mathbf{A} \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$, $T = C…
Attention mechanisms have revolutionized several domains of artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing and computer vision, by enabling models to selectively focus on relevant parts of the input data. While recent work has…
Stochastic gradient methods are dominant in nonconvex optimization especially for deep models but have low asymptotical convergence due to the fixed smoothness. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method for improving…
Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…
We consider the composite minimization problem with the objective function being the sum of a continuously differentiable and a merely lower semicontinuous and extended-valued function. The proximal gradient method is probably the most…
This paper focuses on the decentralized optimization (minimization and saddle point) problems with objective functions that satisfy Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz condition (PL-condition). The first part of the paper is devoted to the minimization…
This paper studies the policy mirror descent (PMD) method, which is a general policy optimization framework in reinforcement learning and can cover a wide range of policy gradient methods by specifying difference mirror maps. Existing…
Mirror descent plays a crucial role in constrained optimization and acceleration schemes, along with its corresponding low-resolution ordinary differential equations (ODEs) framework have been proposed. However, the low-resolution ODEs are…
The success of deep learning is due, to a large extent, to the remarkable effectiveness of gradient-based optimization methods applied to large neural networks. The purpose of this work is to propose a modern view and a general mathematical…
Communication has been seen as a significant bottleneck in industrial applications over large-scale networks. To alleviate the communication burden, sign-based optimization algorithms have gained popularity recently in both industrial and…
Theoretical estimates of the convergence rate of many well-known gradient-type optimization methods are based on quadratic interpolation, provided that the Lipschitz condition for the gradient is satisfied. In this article we obtain a…
In this paper, we consider the problem of phase retrieval, which consists of recovering an $n$-dimensional real vector from the magnitude of its $m$ linear measurements. We propose a mirror descent (or Bregman gradient descent) algorithm…
This is a handbook of simple proofs of the convergence of gradient and stochastic gradient descent type methods. We consider functions that are Lipschitz, smooth, convex, strongly convex, and/or Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz functions. Our focus is…
Given a convex optimization problem and its dual, there are many possible first-order algorithms. In this paper, we show the equivalence between mirror descent algorithms and algorithms generalizing the conditional gradient method. This is…
We prove that the norm version of the adaptive stochastic gradient method (AdaGrad-Norm) achieves a linear convergence rate for a subset of either strongly convex functions or non-convex functions that satisfy the Polyak Lojasiewicz (PL)…