Related papers: Towards Noise-adaptive, Problem-adaptive (Accelera…

We consider gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize applied to logistic regression with linearly separable data, where the constant stepsize $\eta$ is so large that the loss initially oscillates. We show that GD exits this initial…

This work investigates stepsize-based acceleration of gradient descent with {\em anytime} convergence guarantees. For smooth (non-strongly) convex optimization, we propose a stepsize schedule that allows gradient descent to achieve…

Many relevant problems in the area of systems and control, such as controller synthesis, observer design and model reduction, can be viewed as optimization problems involving dynamical systems: for instance, maximizing performance in the…

Stochastic gradient methods are dominant in nonconvex optimization especially for deep models but have low asymptotical convergence due to the fixed smoothness. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method for improving…

In recent literature, a general two step procedure has been formulated for solving the problem of phase retrieval. First, a spectral technique is used to obtain a constant-error initial estimate, following which, the estimate is refined to…

We study the problem of non-convex optimization using Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD). SGLD is a natural and popular variation of stochastic gradient descent where at each step, appropriately scaled Gaussian noise is added. To…

An algorithm is said to be adaptive to a certain parameter (of the problem) if it does not need a priori knowledge of such a parameter but performs competitively to those that know it. This dissertation presents our work on adaptive…

Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…

This paper presents a novel adaptation of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), termed AdaBatchGrad. This modification seamlessly integrates an adaptive step size with an adjustable batch size. An increase in batch size and a decrease in…

Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…

Understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants is essential for machine learning. However, most of the preceding analyses are conducted under amenable conditions such as unbiased gradient estimator and bounded objective…

In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…

In this paper, we examine the time it takes for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to reach the global minimum of a general, non-convex loss function. We approach this question through the lens of randomly perturbed dynamical systems and…

SketchySGD improves upon existing stochastic gradient methods in machine learning by using randomized low-rank approximations to the subsampled Hessian and by introducing an automated stepsize that works well across a wide range of convex…

Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the context of deep neural networks has raised lots of concerns recently. Along this line, we study a general form of gradient based optimization dynamics with unbiased…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variations have been effectively used to optimize neural network models. However, with the rapid growth of big data and deep learning, SGD is no longer the most suitable choice due to its…

We consider the minimization of an objective function given access to unbiased estimates of its gradient through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with constant step-size. While the detailed analysis was only performed for quadratic…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used techniques for online optimization in machine learning. In this work, we accelerate SGD by adaptively learning how to sample the most useful training examples at each time…

Distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with gradient compression has become a popular communication-efficient solution for accelerating distributed learning. One commonly used method for gradient compression is Top-K sparsification,…

Stochastic gradient algorithms are the main focus of large-scale optimization problems and led to important successes in the recent advancement of the deep learning algorithms. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of…