Related papers: Ellipsoid method for convex stochastic optimizatio…
In this paper, we introduce the tamed stochastic gradient descent method (TSGD) for optimization problems. Inspired by the tamed Euler scheme, which is a commonly used method within the context of stochastic differential equations, TSGD is…
The ellipsoid method is an algorithm that solves the (weak) feasibility and linear optimization problems for convex sets by making oracle calls to their (weak) separation problem. We observe that the previously known method for showing that…
In several experimental reports on nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was observed to prefer minimizers with flat basins in comparison to more deterministic methods, yet there is very…
A branch and bound algorithm is developed for global optimization. Branching in the algorithm is accomplished by subdividing the feasible set using ellipses. Lower bounds are obtained by replacing the concave part of the objective function…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been found to be surprisingly effective in training a variety of deep neural networks. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how and why SGD can train these complex networks towards a…
We study the problem of non-convex optimization using Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD). SGLD is a natural and popular variation of stochastic gradient descent where at each step, appropriately scaled Gaussian noise is added. To…
In this paper we consider large-scale smooth optimization problems with multiple linear coupled constraints. Due to the non-separability of the constraints, arbitrary random sketching would not be guaranteed to work. Thus, we first…
This paper considers a general problem of convex stochastic optimization in a relatively low-dimensional space (e.g., 100 variables). It is known that for deterministic convex optimization problems of small dimensions, the fastest…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is…
We study a new aggregation operator for gradients coming from a mini-batch for stochastic gradient (SG) methods that allows a significant speed-up in the case of sparse optimization problems. We call this method AdaBatch and it only…
Stochastic gradient method (SGM) has been popularly applied to solve optimization problems with objective that is stochastic or an average of many functions. Most existing works on SGMs assume that the underlying problem is unconstrained or…
A multiscale numerical method is proposed for the solution of semi-linear elliptic stochastic partial differential equations with localized uncertainties and non-linearities, the uncertainties being modeled by a set of random parameters. It…
In this paper, we utilize stochastic optimization to reduce the space complexity of convex composite optimization with a nuclear norm regularizer, where the variable is a matrix of size $m \times n$. By constructing a low-rank estimate of…
One of the most widely used methods for solving large-scale stochastic optimization problems is distributed asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (DASGD), a family of algorithms that result from parallelizing stochastic gradient descent…
We propose a general yet simple theorem describing the convergence of SGD under the arbitrary sampling paradigm. Our theorem describes the convergence of an infinite array of variants of SGD, each of which is associated with a specific…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the algorithm we use to train neural networks. However, it remains poorly understood how the SGD navigates the highly nonlinear and degenerate loss landscape of a neural network. In this…
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…
This paper deals with composite optimization problems having the objective function formed as the sum of two terms, one has Lipschitz continuous gradient along random subspaces and may be nonconvex and the second term is simple and…
Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithms have been shown to work favorably in solving large-scale learning problems. Despite the remarkable success, the stochastic gradient complexity of SVRG-type algorithms usually scales…