Related papers: Stochastic optimization with momentum: convergence…
There is widespread sentiment that it is not possible to effectively utilize fast gradient methods (e.g. Nesterov's acceleration, conjugate gradient, heavy ball) for the purposes of stochastic optimization due to their instability and error…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
We provide a simple proof of convergence covering both the Adam and Adagrad adaptive optimization algorithms when applied to smooth (possibly non-convex) objective functions with bounded gradients. We show that in expectation, the squared…
Stochastic nested optimization, including stochastic compositional, min-max and bilevel optimization, is gaining popularity in many machine learning applications. While the three problems share the nested structure, existing works often…
Adaptive gradient optimization methods, such as Adam, are prevalent in training deep neural networks across diverse machine learning tasks due to their ability to achieve faster convergence. However, these methods often suffer from…
Gradient clipping is a commonly used technique to stabilize the training process of neural networks. A growing body of studies has shown that gradient clipping is a promising technique for dealing with the heavy-tailed behavior that emerged…
In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants (Polyak Heavy-Ball and Nesterov) for tracking time-varying optima under strong convexity and smoothness. Our…
We develop a simple routine unifying the analysis of several important recently-developed stochastic optimization methods including SAGA, Finito, and stochastic dual coordinate ascent (SDCA). First, we show an intrinsic connection between…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
In stochastic optimization, a common tool to deal sequentially with large sample is to consider the well-known stochastic gradient algorithm. Nevertheless, since the stepsequence is the same for each direction, this can lead to bad results…
Stochastic optimization algorithms, particularly stochastic policy gradient (SPG), report significant success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, up to now, that how to speedily acquire an optimal solution for RL is still a…
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…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
Due to its simplicity and outstanding ability to generalize, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is still the most widely used optimization method despite its slow convergence. Meanwhile, adaptive methods have attracted rising attention of…
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…
Adam is a widely used stochastic optimization method for deep learning applications. While practitioners prefer Adam because it requires less parameter tuning, its use is problematic from a theoretical point of view since it may not…
In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…
Stochastic compositional optimization generalizes classic (non-compositional) stochastic optimization to the minimization of compositions of functions. Each composition may introduce an additional expectation. The series of expectations may…
Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…