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We study the problem of minimizing the average of a very large number of smooth functions, which is of key importance in training supervised learning models. One of the most celebrated methods in this context is the SAGA algorithm. Despite…
The Conditional Gradient (or Frank-Wolfe) method is one of the most well-known methods for solving constrained optimization problems appearing in various machine learning tasks. The simplicity of iteration and applicability to many…
It seems that in the current age, computers, computation, and data have an increasingly important role to play in scientific research and discovery. This is reflected in part by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence,…
Stochastic gradient descent is a canonical tool for addressing stochastic optimization problems, and forms the bedrock of modern machine learning and statistics. In this work, we seek to balance the fact that attenuating step-size is…
We study a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems in which the objective is a sum of two functions: One function is the average of a large number of differentiable functions, while the other function is proper, lower…
In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…
This paper studies properties of fixed points of generalised Extra-gradient (GEG) algorithms applied to min-max problems. We discuss connections between saddle points of the objective function of the min-max problem and GEG fixed points. We…
Recently, lower-level constrained bilevel optimization has attracted increasing attention. However, existing methods mostly focus on either deterministic cases or problems with linear constraints. The main challenge in stochastic cases with…
A subgradient method is presented for solving general convex optimization problems, the main requirement being that a strictly-feasible point is known. A feasible sequence of iterates is generated, which converges to within user-specified…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…
Distributed optimization methods are often applied to solving huge-scale problems like training neural networks with millions and even billions of parameters. In such applications, communicating full vectors, e.g., (stochastic) gradients,…
Stochastic particle-optimization sampling (SPOS) is a recently-developed scalable Bayesian sampling framework that unifies stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) algorithms based on Wasserstein…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a powerful method for improving generalization in machine learning models by minimizing the sharpness of the loss landscape. However, despite its success, several important questions…
Expectation propagation (EP) is a deterministic approximation algorithm that is often used to perform approximate Bayesian parameter learning. EP approximates the full intractable posterior distribution through a set of local approximations…
We apply stochastic average gradient (SAG) algorithms for training conditional random fields (CRFs). We describe a practical implementation that uses structure in the CRF gradient to reduce the memory requirement of this linearly-convergent…
In this work, we consider constrained stochastic optimization problems under hidden convexity, i.e., those that admit a convex reformulation via non-linear (but invertible) map $c(\cdot)$. A number of non-convex problems ranging from…
Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…
Stochastic computation graphs (SCGs) provide a formalism to represent structured optimization problems arising in artificial intelligence, including supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. Previous work has shown that an…
We present a unified theorem for the convergence analysis of stochastic gradient algorithms for minimizing a smooth and convex loss plus a convex regularizer. We do this by extending the unified analysis of Gorbunov, Hanzely \& Richt\'arik…
Theoretically understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in overparameterized models has led to the development of several optimization algorithms that are widely used in practice today. Recent work by~\citet{zou2021benign} provides…