Related papers: Stochastic Reweighted Gradient Descent
In this note we propose a new variant of the hybrid variance-reduced proximal gradient method in [7] to solve a common stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problem under standard assumptions. We simply replace the independent…
Stochastic variance reduced optimization methods are known to be globally convergent while they suffer from slow local convergence, especially when moderate or high accuracy is needed. To alleviate this problem, we propose an optimization…
Many machine learning, statistical inference, and portfolio optimization problems require minimization of a composition of expected value functions (CEVF). Of particular interest is the finite-sum versions of such compositional optimization…
This paper explores the non-convex composition optimization in the form including inner and outer finite-sum functions with a large number of component functions. This problem arises in some important applications such as nonlinear…
Policy gradient (PG) gives rise to a rich class of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Recently, there has been an emerging trend to accelerate the existing PG methods such as REINFORCE by the \emph{variance reduction} techniques. However,…
While SGD, which samples from the data with replacement is widely studied in theory, a variant called Random Reshuffling (RR) is more common in practice. RR iterates through random permutations of the dataset and has been shown to converge…
Variance reduction (VR) techniques for convergence rate acceleration of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm have been developed with great efforts recently. VR's two variants, stochastic variance-reduced-gradient (SVRG-SGD) and…
We introduce a hybrid stochastic estimator to design stochastic gradient algorithms for solving stochastic optimization problems. Such a hybrid estimator is a convex combination of two existing biased and unbiased estimators and leads to…
Stochastic optimization algorithms are widely used for large-scale data analysis due to their low per-iteration costs, but they often suffer from slow asymptotic convergence caused by inherent variance. Variance-reduced techniques have been…
Large-scale constrained optimization problems are at the core of many tasks in control, signal processing, and machine learning. Notably, problems with functional constraints arise when, beyond a performance{\nobreakdash-}centric goal…
Virtually all state-of-the-art methods for training supervised machine learning models are variants of SGD enhanced with a number of additional tricks, such as minibatching, momentum, and adaptive stepsizes. One of the tricks that works so…
In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original SVRG, called variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Unlike the choices of snapshot and starting points in SVRG and its proximal variant, Prox-SVRG, the two vectors…
We develop and analyze a procedure for gradient-based optimization that we refer to as stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG). As a member of the SVRG family of algorithms, SCSG makes use of gradient estimates at two scales,…
Variance reduction is a crucial tool for improving the slow convergence of stochastic gradient descent. Only a few variance-reduced methods, however, have yet been shown to directly benefit from Nesterov's acceleration techniques to match…
The application of stochastic variance reduction to optimization has shown remarkable recent theoretical and practical success. The applicability of these techniques to the hard non-convex optimization problems encountered during training…
This paper investigates the problems large-scale distributed composite convex optimization, with motivations from a broad range of applications, including multi-agent systems, federated learning, smart grids, wireless sensor networks,…
The Stochastic Gradient Descent method (SGD) and its stochastic variants have become methods of choice for solving finite-sum optimization problems arising from machine learning and data science thanks to their ability to handle large-scale…
In the era of big data, optimizing large scale machine learning problems becomes a challenging task and draws significant attention. Asynchronous optimization algorithms come out as a promising solution. Recently, decoupled asynchronous…
We study diffusion and consensus based optimization of a sum of unknown convex objective functions over distributed networks. The only access to these functions is through stochastic gradient oracles, each of which is only available at a…
In the context of finite sums minimization, variance reduction techniques are widely used to improve the performance of state-of-the-art stochastic gradient methods. Their practical impact is clear, as well as their theoretical properties.…