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We introduce data structures for solving robust regression through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by sampling gradients with probability proportional to their norm, i.e., importance sampling. Although SGD is widely used for large scale…
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…
In this paper, we study the convergence of the Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) algorithm under unconstrained non-convex smooth stochastic optimizations. Despite the widespread usage in machine learning areas, its theoretical properties…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
Score-based diffusion models, while achieving minimax optimality for sampling, are often hampered by slow sampling speeds due to the high computational burden of score function evaluations. Despite the recent remarkable empirical advances…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
We revisit the identification of an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy in average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In such MDPs, two measures of complexity have appeared in the literature: the diameter, $D$, and the optimal bias span, $H$,…
The goal of policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) is to search the maximal point of its objective. However, due to the inherent non-concavity of its objective, convergence to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) can not guarantee the…
Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) is a framework for performing likelihood-free posterior inference for simulation models. Stochastic Variational inference (SVI) is an appealing alternative to the inefficient sampling approaches…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
Variance reduction (VR) methods employ stochastic gradients with decreasing variance, and they have been widely applied to solve large-scale optimization problems in machine learning because of their efficiency. Existing theoretical studies…
The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…
We prove local convergence of several notable gradient descent algorithms used in machine learning, for which standard stochastic gradient descent theory does not apply directly. This includes, first, online algorithms for recurrent models…
Policy gradient methods with actor-critic schemes demonstrate tremendous empirical successes, especially when the actors and critics are parameterized by neural networks. However, it remains less clear whether such "neural" policy gradient…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) and its variants are widely-used policy search methods in reinforcement learning. Inspired by prior work, a new NPG variant coined NPG-HM is developed in this paper, which utilizes the Hessian-aided momentum…
Gradient descent is one of the most widely used iterative algorithms in modern statistical learning. However, its precise algorithmic dynamics in high-dimensional settings remain only partially understood, which has limited its broader…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…
Decentralized stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD) is an efficient method for large-scale distributed learning. Existing generalization studies mainly address expected results, achieving rates limited to $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{\delta…
We consider the stochastic gradient method with random reshuffling ($\mathsf{RR}$) for tackling smooth nonconvex optimization problems. $\mathsf{RR}$ finds broad applications in practice, notably in training neural networks. In this work,…