Related papers: Towards Statistical and Computational Complexities…
The asymptotic behavior of stochastic gradient algorithms is studied. Relying on results from differential geometry (Lojasiewicz gradient inequality), the single limit-point convergence of the algorithm iterates is demonstrated and…
We analyze the constant step size subgradient method on nonsmooth, nonconvex functions. We identify geometric assumptions on the objective function under which i) its domain admits a partition (stratification) into smooth manifolds (strata)…
This paper addresses the study of derivative-free smooth optimization problems, where the gradient information on the objective function is unavailable. Two novel general derivative-free methods are proposed and developed for minimizing…
We address the problem of distributed convex unconstrained optimization over networks characterized by asynchronous and possibly lossy communications. We analyze the case where the global cost function is the sum of locally coupled local…
Communication delays and synchronization are major bottlenecks for parallel computing, and tolerating asynchrony is therefore crucial for accelerating parallel computation. Motivated by optimization problems that do not satisfy convexity…
In this paper, we refine the Berry-Esseen bounds for the multivariate normal approximation of Polyak-Ruppert averaged iterates arising from the linear stochastic approximation (LSA) algorithm with decreasing step size. We consider the…
A generalized conditional gradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of them differentiable, is presented. This iterative method relies on two main ingredients: First, the minimization of a partially linearized…
We investigate the convergence rates and data sample sizes required for training a machine learning model using a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, where data points are sampled based on either their loss value or uncertainty…
Stochastic gradient optimization methods are broadly used to minimize non-convex smooth objective functions, for instance when training deep neural networks. However, theoretical guarantees on the asymptotic behaviour of these methods…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular tool in training large-scale machine learning models. Its performance, however, is highly variable, depending crucially on the choice of the step sizes. Accordingly, a variety of strategies for…
A prevalent belief among optimization specialists is that linear convergence of gradient descent is contingent on the function growing quadratically away from its minimizers. In this work, we argue that this belief is inaccurate. We show…
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…
Statistical machine learning models trained with stochastic gradient algorithms are increasingly being deployed in critical scientific applications. However, computing the stochastic gradient in several such applications is highly expensive…
Recent studies have provided both empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in various scenarios. Such heavy tails potentially result in iterates with diverging…
Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…
We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…
We study the distributed stochastic compositional optimization problems over directed communication networks in which agents privately own a stochastic compositional objective function and collaborate to minimize the sum of all objective…
We consider $d$-dimensional linear stochastic approximation algorithms (LSAs) with a constant step-size and the so called Polyak-Ruppert (PR) averaging of iterates. LSAs are widely applied in machine learning and reinforcement learning…
Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…
Gradient descent (GD) is a collection of continuous optimization methods that have achieved immeasurable success in practice. Owing to data science applications, GD with diminishing step sizes has become a prominent variant. While this…