Related papers: Does Momentum Help? A Sample Complexity Analysis
We present a theoretical analysis of stochastic optimization methods in terms of their sensitivity with respect to the step size. We identify a key quantity that, for each method, describes how the performance degrades as the step size…
Nesterov's accelerated gradient (AG) is a popular technique to optimize objective functions comprising two components: a convex loss and a penalty function. While AG methods perform well for convex penalties, such as the LASSO, convergence…
Extrapolation methods use the last few iterates of an optimization algorithm to produce a better estimate of the optimum. They were shown to achieve optimal convergence rates in a deterministic setting using simple gradient iterates. Here,…
In this paper, we revisit stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with AdaGrad-type preconditioning. Our contributions are twofold. First, we develop a unified convergence analysis of SGD with adaptive preconditioning under anisotropic or matrix…
This paper delves into the realm of stochastic optimization for compositional minimax optimization - a pivotal challenge across various machine learning domains, including deep AUC and reinforcement learning policy evaluation. Despite its…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), in which a momentum term is added to SGD, has been well studied in both theory and practice. The theoretical studies show that the settings of the learning rate and momentum weight affect…
An important open problem is the theoretically feasible acceleration of mini-batch SGD-type algorithms on quadratic problems with power-law spectrum. In the non-stochastic setting, the optimal exponent $\xi$ in the loss convergence $L_t\sim…
We propose a stochastic conditional gradient method (CGM) for minimizing convex finite-sum objectives formed as a sum of smooth and non-smooth terms. Existing CGM variants for this template either suffer from slow convergence rates, or…
Convergence detection of iterative stochastic optimization methods is of great practical interest. This paper considers stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate and momentum. We show that there exists a transient…
Two new stochastic variance-reduced algorithms named SARAH and SPIDER have been recently proposed, and SPIDER has been shown to achieve a near-optimal gradient oracle complexity for nonconvex optimization. However, the theoretical advantage…
This paper considers the problem of understanding the behavior of a general class of accelerated gradient methods on smooth nonconvex functions. Motivated by some recent works that have proposed effective algorithms, based on Polyak's heavy…
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 methods (SGMs) are predominant approaches for solving stochastic optimization. On smooth nonconvex problems, a few acceleration techniques have been applied to improve the convergence rate of SGMs. However, little…
In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. More precisely, we interpret a large class of…
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. This point of view covers the stochastic gradient…
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,…
Overshoot is a novel, momentum-based stochastic gradient descent optimization method designed to enhance performance beyond standard and Nesterov's momentum. In conventional momentum methods, gradients from previous steps are aggregated…
Variance reduction has emerged in recent years as a strong competitor to stochastic gradient descent in non-convex problems, providing the first algorithms to improve upon the converge rate of stochastic gradient descent for finding…
Adaptive moment methods have been remarkably successful in deep learning optimization, particularly in the presence of noisy and/or sparse gradients. We further the advantages of adaptive moment techniques by proposing a family of double…