Related papers: Fast Stochastic Bregman Gradient Methods: Sharp An…
We consider a family of algorithms that successively sample and minimize simple stochastic models of the objective function. We show that under reasonable conditions on approximation quality and regularity of the models, any such algorithm…
A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…
Recent work has established an empirically successful framework for adapting learning rates for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). This effectively removes all needs for tuning, while automatically reducing learning rates over time on…
We consider stochastic approximation for the least squares regression problem in the non-strongly convex setting. We present the first practical algorithm that achieves the optimal prediction error rates in terms of dependence on the noise…
There has been a growing effort in studying the distributed optimization problem over a network. The objective is to optimize a global function formed by a sum of local functions, using only local computation and communication. Literature…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been widely used in statistical estimation for large-scale data due to its computational and memory efficiency. While most existing works focus on the convergence of the objective function…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…
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.…
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…
In this paper, we present a stochastic gradient algorithm for minimizing a smooth objective function that is an expectation over noisy cost samples, and only the latter are observed for any given parameter. Our algorithm employs a gradient…
We propose an adaptive accelerated gradient method for solving smooth convex optimization problems. The method incorporates a scheme to determine the step size adaptively, by means of a local estimation of the smoothness constant, which is…
In this paper, we aim to reconstruct an n-dimensional real vector from m phaseless measurements corrupted by an additive noise. We extend the noiseless framework developed in [15], based on mirror descent (or Bregman gradient descent), to…
The success of adversarial formulations in machine learning has brought renewed motivation for smooth games. In this work, we focus on the class of stochastic Hamiltonian methods and provide the first convergence guarantees for certain…
In this paper, we present a new stochastic algorithm, namely the stochastic block mirror descent (SBMD) method for solving large-scale nonsmooth and stochastic optimization problems. The basic idea of this algorithm is to incorporate the…
In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of nonsmooth and convex functions. Such problems often arise in typical machine learning problems as empirical risk minimization, but are computationally…
We study stochastic algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems with a convex yet possibly nonsmooth regularizer, which find wide applications in many practical machine learning applications. However, compared to asynchronous…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for strongly convex functions converges at the rate $\bO(1/k)$. However, achieving good results in practice requires tuning the parameters (for example the learning rate) of the algorithm. In this paper we…
We formulate and study a general family of (continuous-time) stochastic dynamics for accelerated first-order minimization of smooth convex functions. Building on an averaging formulation of accelerated mirror descent, we propose a…
This work characterizes the benefits of averaging schemes widely used in conjunction with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In particular, this work provides a sharp analysis of: (1) mini-batching, a method of averaging many samples of a…
In this paper, we provide a theoretical study of noise geometry for minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a phenomenon where noise aligns favorably with the geometry of local landscape. We propose two metrics, derived from analyzing…