Related papers: Towards Statistical and Computational Complexities…

Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (PL) [Polyak, 1963] condition is a weaker condition than the strong convexity but suffices to ensure a global convergence for the Gradient Descent algorithm. In this paper, we study the lower bound of algorithms using…

An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…

Stochastic gradient methods enable learning probabilistic models from large amounts of data. While large step-sizes (learning rates) have shown to be best for least-squares (e.g., Gaussian noise) once combined with parameter averaging,…

We study a fixed step-size noisy distributed gradient descent algorithm for solving optimization problems in which the objective is a finite sum of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Random perturbations are introduced to the…

We propose a new stochastic gradient method called MOTAPS (Moving Targetted Polyak Stepsize) that uses recorded past loss values to compute adaptive stepsizes. MOTAPS can be seen as a variant of the Stochastic Polyak (SP) which is also a…

We prove that stochastic gradient descent efficiently converges to the global optimizer of the maximum likelihood objective of an unknown linear time-invariant dynamical system from a sequence of noisy observations generated by the system.…

We contribute to the growing body of knowledge on more powerful and adaptive stepsizes for convex optimization, empowered by local curvature information. We do not go the route of fully-fledged second-order methods which require the…

We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: the problem of minimizing the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex loss functions. A recent work of Bassily et al. (2019)…

Conditional Value-at-Risk ($\mathrm{CV@R}$) is one of the most popular measures of risk, which has been recently considered as a performance criterion in supervised statistical learning, as it is related to desirable operational features in…

In this work, we analyze the convergence of Polyak's heavy ball method in both continuous and discrete time for non-convex $C^4$-objective functions satisfying the Polyak-Lojasiewicz inequality. Under this weak assumption, we recover the…

In 1963 Boris Polyak suggested a particular step size for gradient descent methods, now known as the Polyak step size, that he later adapted to subgradient methods. The Polyak step size requires knowledge of the optimal value of the…

The convergence rate of stochastic gradient search is analyzed in this paper. Using arguments based on differential geometry and Lojasiewicz inequalities, tight bounds on the convergence rate of general stochastic gradient algorithms are…

This paper provides a finite-time analysis of linear stochastic approximation (LSA) algorithms with fixed step size, a core method in statistics and machine learning. LSA is used to compute approximate solutions of a $d$-dimensional linear…

There are much recent interests in solving noncovnex min-max optimization problems due to its broad applications in many areas including machine learning, networked resource allocations, and distributed optimization. Perhaps, the most…

We provide a detailed study on the implicit bias of gradient descent when optimizing loss functions with strictly monotone tails, such as the logistic loss, over separable datasets. We look at two basic questions: (a) what are the…

Tuning the step size of stochastic gradient descent is tedious and error prone. This has motivated the development of methods that automatically adapt the step size using readily available information. In this paper, we consider the family…

In this paper, we establish the non-asymptotic validity of the multiplier bootstrap procedure for constructing the confidence sets using the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm. Under appropriate regularity conditions, our approach…

In this paper, we study a simple algorithm to construct asymptotically valid confidence regions for model parameters using the batch means method. The main idea is to cancel out the covariance matrix which is hard/costly to estimate. In the…

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been the method of choice for learning large-scale non-convex models. While a general analysis of when SGD works has been elusive, there has been a lot of recent progress in understanding the…