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Related papers: Better SGD using Second-order Momentum

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We study stochastic second-order methods for solving general non-convex optimization problems. We propose using a special version of momentum to stabilize the stochastic gradient and Hessian estimates in Newton's method. We show that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-27 El Mahdi Chayti , Nikita Doikov , Martin Jaggi

In this paper, we introduce a Homogeneous Second-Order Descent Method (HSODM) using the homogenized quadratic approximation to the original function. The merit of homogenization is that only the leftmost eigenvector of a gradient-Hessian…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-08 Chuwen Zhang , Dongdong Ge , Chang He , Bo Jiang , Yuntian Jiang , Chenyu Xue , Yinyu Ye

We present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Ashok Cutkosky , Harsh Mehta , Francesco Orabona

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Alexander Rakhlin , Ohad Shamir , Karthik Sridharan

We present an algorithm for minimizing a sum of functions that combines the computational efficiency of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with the second order curvature information leveraged by quasi-Newton methods. We unify these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-12-02 Jascha Sohl-Dickstein , Ben Poole , Surya Ganguli

We develop optimization methods which offer new trade-offs between the number of gradient and Hessian computations needed to compute the critical point of a non-convex function. We provide a method that for any twice-differentiable $f\colon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-24 Deeksha Adil , Brian Bullins , Aaron Sidford , Chenyi Zhang

We present a new accelerated stochastic second-order method that is robust to both gradient and Hessian inexactness, which occurs typically in machine learning. We establish theoretical lower bounds and prove that our algorithm achieves…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-28 Artem Agafonov , Dmitry Kamzolov , Alexander Gasnikov , Ali Kavis , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Volkan Cevher , Martin Takáč

Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Harsh Vardhan , Sebastian U. Stich

We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Zhize Li

In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-05 Cong Fang , Zhouchen Lin , Tong Zhang

We propose a stochastic recursive momentum method for Riemannian non-convex optimization that achieves a near-optimal complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-3})$ to find $\epsilon$-approximate solution with one sample. That is, our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-12 Andi Han , Junbin Gao

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are the most used algorithms in machine learning applications. In particular, SGD with adaptive learning rates and momentum is the industry standard to train deep networks. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-29 Xiaoyu Li , Francesco Orabona

Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-17 Xi He , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Mikhail Smelyanskiy , Martin Takáč

We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-27 Shuyao Li , Stephen J. Wright

Nonconvex optimization underlies many modern machine learning and control tasks, where saddle points pose the dominant obstacle to reliable convergence in high-dimensional settings. Escaping these saddle points deterministically using…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-13 Liraz Mudrik , Isaac Kaminer , Sean Kragelund , Abram H. Clark

Momentum-based gradients are essential for optimizing advanced machine learning models, as they not only accelerate convergence but also advance optimizers to escape stationary points. While most state-of-the-art momentum techniques utilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Wei Zhang , Arif Hassan Zidan , Afrar Jahin , Yu Bao , Tianming Liu

In this work, we develop new optimization algorithms that use approximate second-order information combined with the gradient regularization technique to achieve fast global convergence rates for both convex and non-convex objectives. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-17 Andrei Semenov , Martin Jaggi , Nikita Doikov

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Azar Louzi

This report investigates the fitting of the Hessian or its inverse for stochastic optimizations using a Hessian fitting criterion derived from the preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (PSGD) method. This criterion is closely related…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-02 Xi-Lin Li

The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-28 Elad Hazan , Kfir Y. Levy , Shai Shalev-Shwartz