Related papers: ZeroSARAH: Efficient Nonconvex Finite-Sum Optimiza…

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…

This paper investigates zeroth-order (ZO) finite-sum composite optimization. Recently, variance reduction techniques have been applied to ZO methods to mitigate the non-vanishing variance of 2-point estimators in constrained/composite…

In this paper, we propose Push-SAGA, a decentralized stochastic first-order method for finite-sum minimization over a directed network of nodes. Push-SAGA combines node-level variance reduction to remove the uncertainty caused by stochastic…

Two new stochastic variance-reduced algorithms named SARAH and SPIDER have been recently proposed, and SPIDER has been shown to achieve a near-optimal gradient oracle complexity for nonconvex optimization. However, the theoretical advantage…

This work considers the non-convex finite sum minimization problem. There are several algorithms for such problems, but existing methods often work poorly when the problem is badly scaled and/or ill-conditioned, and a primary goal of this…

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.…

In this paper, we propose a novel accelerated gradient method called ANITA for solving the fundamental finite-sum optimization problems. Concretely, we consider both general convex and strongly convex settings: i) For general convex…

Many important machine learning applications amount to solving minimax optimization problems, and in many cases there is no access to the gradient information, but only the function values. In this paper, we focus on such a gradient-free…

The main theme of this work is a unifying algorithm, \textbf{L}oop\textbf{L}ess \textbf{S}ARAH (L2S) for problems formulated as summation of $n$ individual loss functions. L2S broadens a recently developed variance reduction method known as…

In this work, we consider convex optimization problems with smooth objective function and nonsmooth functional constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called Stochastic Halfspace Approximation Method (SHAM), to solve…

Variance reduction (VR) methods employ stochastic gradients with decreasing variance, and they have been widely applied to solve large-scale optimization problems in machine learning because of their efficiency. Existing theoretical studies…

We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…

In this work, we propose and analyze DCA-PAGE, a novel algorithm that integrates the difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA) with the ProbAbilistic Gradient Estimator (PAGE) to solve structured nonsmooth difference-of-convex programs. In the…

In this paper, we present new stochastic methods for solving two important classes of nonconvex optimization problems. We first introduce a randomized accelerated proximal gradient (RapGrad) method for solving a class of nonconvex…

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 present a unified theorem for the convergence analysis of stochastic gradient algorithms for minimizing a smooth and convex loss plus a convex regularizer. We do this by extending the unified analysis of Gorbunov, Hanzely \& Richt\'arik…

We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…

This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order optimization for smooth nonconvex problems, targeting the trade-off between convergence rate and sampling cost per zeroth-order gradient estimation in current algorithms that use either the…

In this paper, we propose a method of distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD), with low communication load and computational complexity, and still fast convergence. To reduce the communication load, at each iteration of the algorithm,…

Finite-sum optimization plays an important role in the area of machine learning, and hence has triggered a surge of interest in recent years. To address this optimization problem, various randomized incremental gradient methods have been…