Related papers: High-probability Bounds for Non-Convex Stochastic …
``Localization'' has proven to be a valuable tool in the Statistical Learning literature as it allows sharp risk bounds in terms of the problem geometry. Localized bounds seem to be much less exploited in the Stochastic Optimization…
In a broad class of reinforcement learning applications, stochastic rewards have heavy-tailed distributions, which lead to infinite second-order moments for stochastic (semi)gradients in policy evaluation and direct policy optimization. In…
We study trade-offs between convergence rate and robustness to gradient errors in the context of first-order methods. Our focus is on generalized momentum methods (GMMs)--a broad class that includes Nesterov's accelerated gradient,…
Gradient clipping is a standard training technique used in deep learning applications such as large-scale language modeling to mitigate exploding gradients. Recent experimental studies have demonstrated a fairly special behavior in the…
In this paper, we consider nonlinear optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints. We propose a Trust-Region Stochastic Sequential Quadratic Programming (TR-SSQP) method and establish its…
Risk minimization for nonsmooth nonconvex problems naturally leads to first-order sampling or, by an abuse of terminology, to stochastic subgradient descent. We establish the convergence of this method in the path-differentiable case and…
We study stochastic convex optimization (SCO) with heavy-tailed gradients under pure $\varepsilon$-differential privacy (DP). Instead of assuming a bound on the worst-case Lipschitz parameter of the loss, we assume only a bounded $k$-th…
We analyze convergence rates of stochastic optimization procedures for non-smooth convex optimization problems. By combining randomized smoothing techniques with accelerated gradient methods, we obtain convergence rates of stochastic…
This paper studies the complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point for stochastic bilevel optimization when the upper-level problem is nonconvex and the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent work proposed the first-order…
Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…
In this paper, we propose a new, simplified high probability analysis of AdaGrad for smooth, non-convex problems. More specifically, we focus on a particular accelerated gradient (AGD) template (Lan, 2020), through which we recover the…
Due to the non-smoothness of optimization problems in Machine Learning, generalized smoothness assumptions have been gaining a lot of attention in recent years. One of the most popular assumptions of this type is $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness…
We study online convex optimisation with $\ell_q$-Lipschitz losses, $\ell_p$-regularised FTRL, and randomised two-point finite-difference gradient estimators based on cone-measure sampling from $\ell_r$-spheres. For random Lipschitz losses…
Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…
An influential line of recent work has focused on the generalization properties of unregularized gradient-based learning procedures applied to separable linear classification with exponentially-tailed loss functions. The ability of such…
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…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
Often in the analysis of first-order methods, assuming the existence of a quadratic growth bound (a generalization of strong convexity) facilitates much stronger convergence analysis. Hence the analysis is done twice, once for the general…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a prevalent optimization technique for large-scale distributed machine learning. While SGD computation can be efficiently divided between multiple machines, communication typically becomes a bottleneck…