Related papers: Improved Analysis and Rates for Variance Reduction…
In this paper we provide a thorough, rigorous theoretical framework to assess optimality guarantees of sampling-based algorithms for drift control systems: systems that, loosely speaking, can not stop instantaneously due to momentum. We…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
Many stochastic optimization algorithms work by estimating the gradient of the cost function on the fly by sampling datapoints uniformly at random from a training set. However, the estimator might have a large variance, which inadvertently…
Modern stochastic optimization methods often rely on uniform sampling which is agnostic to the underlying characteristics of the data. This might degrade the convergence by yielding estimates that suffer from a high variance. A possible…
We consider minimization of composite functions of the form $f(g(x))+h(x)$, where $f$ and $h$ are convex functions (which can be nonsmooth) and $g$ is a smooth vector mapping. In addition, we assume that $g$ is the average of finite number…
We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function in $\R^n$ in a setting where only function evaluations are possible. While importance sampling is one of the most popular techniques used by machine…
The non-smooth finite-sum minimization is a fundamental problem in machine learning. This paper develops a distributed stochastic proximal-gradient algorithm with random reshuffling to solve the finite-sum minimization over time-varying…
Shuffling strategies for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), including incremental gradient, shuffle-once, and random reshuffling, are supported by rigorous convergence analyses for arbitrary within-epoch permutations. In particular, random…
We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of \emph{heterogeneous} functions distributed across several machines with a focus on communication efficiency. In such settings, naively using the classical stochastic…
Stochastic variance reduced methods have gained a lot of interest recently for empirical risk minimization due to its appealing run time complexity. When the data size is large and disjointly stored on different machines, it becomes…
Motion planning under differential constraints is a classic problem in robotics. To date, the state of the art is represented by sampling-based techniques, with the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree algorithm as a leading example. Yet, the…
Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization…
We study dropout regularization in continuous-time models through the lens of random-batch methods -- a family of stochastic sampling schemes originally devised to reduce the computational cost of interacting particle systems. We construct…
Choosing the optimization algorithm that performs best on a given machine learning problem is often delicate, and there is no guarantee that current state-of-the-art algorithms will perform well across all tasks. Consequently, the more…
We study convergence rates of the classic proximal bundle method for a variety of nonsmooth convex optimization problems. We show that, without any modification, this algorithm adapts to converge faster in the presence of smoothness or a…
Machine learning algorithms in high-dimensional settings are highly susceptible to the influence of even a small fraction of structured outliers, making robust optimization techniques essential. In particular, within the…
Using the asymptotical minimax framework, we examine convergence rates equivalency between a continuous functional deconvolution model and its real-life discrete counterpart over a wide range of Besov balls and for the $L^2$-risk. For this…
A recent line of ground-breaking results for permutation-based SGD has corroborated a widely observed phenomenon: random permutations offer faster convergence than with-replacement sampling. However, is random optimal? We show that this…
Several useful variance-reduced stochastic gradient algorithms, such as SVRG, SAGA, Finito, and SAG, have been proposed to minimize empirical risks with linear convergence properties to the exact minimizer. The existing convergence results…
Stochastic composition optimization draws much attention recently and has been successful in many emerging applications of machine learning, statistical analysis, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we focus on the composition…