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Related papers: Averaged Heavy-Ball Method

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Since Polyak's pioneering work, heavy ball (HB) momentum has been widely studied in minimization. However, its role in min-max games remains largely unexplored. As a key component of practical min-max algorithms like Adam, this gap limits…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yi Feng , Kaito Fujii , Stratis Skoulakis , Xiao Wang , Volkan Cevher

In this work, we propose an adaptive variation on the classical Heavy-ball method for convex quadratic minimization. The adaptivity crucially relies on so-called "Polyak step-sizes", which consists in using the knowledge of the optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-13 Baptiste Goujaud , Adrien Taylor , Aymeric Dieuleveut

The stochastic heavy ball momentum (SHBM) method has gained considerable popularity as a scalable approach for solving large-scale optimization problems. However, one limitation of this method is its reliance on prior knowledge of certain…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-04 Yun Zeng , Deren Han , Yansheng Su , Jiaxin Xie

This paper establishes global convergence and provides global bounds of the convergence rate of the Heavy-ball method for convex optimization problems. When the objective function has Lipschitz-continuous gradient, we show that the Cesaro…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-12-24 Euhanna Ghadimi , Hamid Reza Feyzmahdavian , Mikael Johansson

Simple stochastic momentum methods are widely used in machine learning optimization, but their good practical performance is at odds with an absence of theoretical guarantees of acceleration in the literature. In this work, we aim to close…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Raghu Bollapragada , Tyler Chen , Rachel Ward

Stochastic Heavy Ball (SHB) and Nesterov's Accelerated Stochastic Gradient (ASG) are popular momentum methods in stochastic optimization. While benefits of such acceleration ideas in deterministic settings are well understood, their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Swetha Ganesh , Rohan Deb , Gugan Thoppe , Amarjit Budhiraja

The stochastic heavy ball method (SHB), also known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with Polyak's momentum, is widely used in training neural networks. However, despite the remarkable success of such algorithm in practice, its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Diyuan Wu , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Marco Mondelli

We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and the stochastic heavy ball method (SHB, otherwise known as the momentum method) for the general stochastic approximation problem. For SGD, in the convex and smooth setting, we provide the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Othmane Sebbouh , Robert M. Gower , Aaron Defazio

In this paper we consider ill-posed inverse problems, both linear and nonlinear, by a heavy ball method in which a strongly convex regularization function is incorporated to detect the feature of the sought solution. We develop ideas on how…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-04-05 Qinian Jin , Qin Huang

In this paper, we establish the convergence of the stochastic Heavy Ball (SHB) algorithm under more general conditions than in the current literature. Specifically, (i) The stochastic gradient is permitted to be biased, and also, to have…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-28 Uday Kiran Reddy Tadipatri , Mathukumalli Vidyasagar

Momentum methods such as Polyak's heavy ball (HB) method, Nesterov's accelerated gradient (AG) as well as accelerated projected gradient (APG) method have been commonly used in machine learning practice, but their performance is quite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-08-20 Bugra Can , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu

This paper deals with a natural stochastic optimization procedure derived from the so-called Heavy-ball method differential equation, which was introduced by Polyak in the 1960s with his seminal contribution [Pol64]. The Heavy-ball method…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-10-24 Sébastien Gadat , Fabien Panloup , Sofiane Saadane

In this paper we develop a stochastic heavy ball method for solving ill-posed inverse problems. The method updates the iterate using only a randomly selected equation at each iteration step while incorporating a momentum term into the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-14 Ruixue Gu , Qinian Jin

First-order optimization methods for nonconvex functions with Lipschitz continuous gradient and Hessian have been extensively studied. State-of-the-art methods for finding an $\varepsilon$-stationary point within $O(\varepsilon^{-{7/4}})$…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-02 Kaito Okamura , Naoki Marumo , Akiko Takeda

We take a Hamiltonian-based perspective to generalize Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent and Polyak's heavy ball method to a broad class of momentum methods in the setting of (possibly) constrained minimization in Euclidean and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-17 Jelena Diakonikolas , Michael I. Jordan

Stochastic momentum methods have been widely adopted in training deep neural networks. However, their theoretical analysis of convergence of the training objective and the generalization error for prediction is still under-explored. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-31 Yan Yan , Tianbao Yang , Zhe Li , Qihang Lin , Yi Yang

The optimization step in many machine learning problems rarely relies on vanilla gradient descent but it is common practice to use momentum-based accelerated methods. Despite these algorithms being widely applied to arbitrary loss…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2021-10-29 Stefano Sarao Mannelli , Pierfrancesco Urbani

This paper addresses smooth convexly constrained optimization problems where the Euclidean projection onto the feasible set is computationally tractable. Although momentum techniques like Polyak's heavy-ball are known for accelerating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-20 Federica Donnini , Pierluigi Mansueto

Accelerated gradient methods like Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient (NAG) achieve faster convergence on well-conditioned problems but often diverge on ill-conditioned or non-convex landscapes due to aggressive momentum accumulation. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Sarwan Ali

We present a stochastic variance-reduced heavy ball power iteration algorithm for solving PCA and provide a convergence analysis for it. The algorithm is an extension of heavy ball power iteration, incorporating a step size so that progress…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-25 Cheolmin Kim , Diego Klabjan