Related papers: On the Convergence of Step Decay Step-Size for Sto…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular tool in training large-scale machine learning models. Its performance, however, is highly variable, depending crucially on the choice of the step sizes. Accordingly, a variety of strategies for…
Efficient computation of min-max problems is a central question in optimization, learning, games, and controls. Arguably the most natural algorithm is gradient-descent-ascent (GDA). However, since the 1970s, conventional wisdom has argued…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
In this paper, the optimal convergence rate $O\left(N^{-1/2}\right)$ (where $N$ is the total number of iterations performed by the algorithm), without the presence of a logarithmic factor, is proved for mirror descent algorithms with…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…
There are much recent interests in solving noncovnex min-max optimization problems due to its broad applications in many areas including machine learning, networked resource allocations, and distributed optimization. Perhaps, the most…
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…
We provide tight finite-time convergence bounds for gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent on quadratic functions, when the gradients are delayed and reflect iterates from $\tau$ rounds ago. First, we show that without stochastic…
In this paper, we consider supervised learning problems such as logistic regression and study the stochastic gradient method with averaging, in the usual stochastic approximation setting where observations are used only once. We show that…
Adam is a popular variant of stochastic gradient descent for finding a local minimizer of a function. In the constant stepsize regime, assuming that the objective function is differentiable and non-convex, we establish the convergence in…
The learning rate in stochastic gradient methods is a critical hyperparameter that is notoriously costly to tune via standard grid search, especially for training modern large-scale models with billions of parameters. We identify a…
We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…
Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…
We showcase important features of the dynamics of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the training of neural networks. We present empirical observations that commonly used large step sizes (i) lead the iterates to jump from one side of…
Much recent attention has been devoted to gradient descent algorithms where the steepest descent step size is replaced by a similar one from a previous iteration or gets updated only once every second step, thus forming a {\em faster…
In this paper, we study the gradient descent-ascent method for convex-concave saddle-point problems. We derive a new non-asymptotic global convergence rate in terms of distance to the solution set by using the semidefinite programming…
We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of…
Increasing the mini-batch size for stochastic gradient descent offers significant opportunities to reduce wall-clock training time, but there are a variety of theoretical and systems challenges that impede the widespread success of this…
We investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…