Related papers: An Even More Optimal Stochastic Optimization Algor…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
Stochastic convex optimization algorithms are the most popular way to train machine learning models on large-scale data. Scaling up the training process of these models is crucial, but the most popular algorithm, Stochastic Gradient Descent…
It has been found that stochastic algorithms often find good solutions much more rapidly than inherently-batch approaches. Indeed, a very useful rule of thumb is that often, when solving a machine learning problem, an iterative technique…
We study a class of bilevel convex optimization problems where the goal is to find the minimizer of an objective function in the upper level, among the set of all optimal solutions of an optimization problem in the lower level. A wide range…
Minimax optimization has been central in addressing various applications in machine learning, game theory, and control theory. Prior literature has thus far mainly focused on studying such problems in the continuous domain, e.g.,…
We study the problem of minimizing the sum of potentially non-differentiable convex cost functions with partially overlapping dependences in an asynchronous manner, where communication in the network is not coordinated. We study the…
This paper proposes a theoretical framework to evaluate and compare the performance of stochastic gradient algorithms for distributed learning in relation to their behavior around local minima in nonconvex environments. Previous works have…
We propose a novel adaptive, accelerated algorithm for the stochastic constrained convex optimization setting. Our method, which is inspired by the Mirror-Prox method, \emph{simultaneously} achieves the optimal rates for smooth/non-smooth…
In the last several years, the intimate connection between convex optimization and learning problems, in both statistical and sequential frameworks, has shifted the focus of algorithmic machine learning to examine this interplay. In…
Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent and variants thereof have become standard for large-scale empirical risk minimization like the training of neural networks. These methods are usually used with a constant batch size chosen by simple…
We consider the projected gradient algorithm for the nonconvex best subset selection problem that minimizes a given empirical loss function under an $\ell_0$-norm constraint. Through decomposing the feasible set of the given sparsity…
We apply a recently developed framework for analyzing the convergence of stochastic algorithms to the general problem of large-scale nonconvex composite optimization more generally, and nonconvex likelihood maximization in particular. Our…
Backtracking line-search is an old yet powerful strategy for finding a better step sizes to be used in proximal gradient algorithms. The main principle is to locally find a simple convex upper bound of the objective function, which in turn…
An optimization algorithm for nonsmooth nonconvex constrained optimization problems with upper-C2 objective functions is proposed and analyzed. Upper-C2 is a weakly concave property that exists in difference of convex (DC) functions and…
We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…
This paper considers stochastic first-order algorithms for convex-concave minimax problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y}f(\bf x, \bf y)$, where $f$ can be presented by the average of $n$ individual components which are $L$-average…
Standard stochastic optimization methods are brittle, sensitive to stepsize choices and other algorithmic parameters, and they exhibit instability outside of well-behaved families of objectives. To address these challenges, we investigate…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…
We develop and analyze an asynchronous algorithm for distributed convex optimization when the objective writes a sum of smooth functions, local to each worker, and a non-smooth function. Unlike many existing methods, our distributed…
We propose a novel method for training deep neural networks that are capable of interpolation, that is, driving the empirical loss to zero. At each iteration, our method constructs a stochastic approximation of the learning objective. The…