Related papers: Random-reshuffled SARAH does not need a full gradi…
In a variety of problems originating in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, the loss function is defined by an expectation over a collection of random variables, which might be part of a probabilistic model or the external…
Adaptivity is an important yet under-studied property in modern optimization theory. The gap between the state-of-the-art theory and the current practice is striking in that algorithms with desirable theoretical guarantees typically involve…
In this paper we present the greedy step averaging(GSA) method, a parameter-free stochastic optimization algorithm for a variety of machine learning problems. As a gradient-based optimization method, GSA makes use of the information from…
We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of \emph{heterogeneous} functions distributed across several machines with a focus on communication efficiency. In such settings, naively using the classical stochastic…
In this paper, a gradient-free distributed algorithm is introduced to solve a set constrained optimization problem under a directed communication network. Specifically, at each time-step, the agents locally compute a so-called…
In stochastic optimization, a common tool to deal sequentially with large sample is to consider the well-known stochastic gradient algorithm. Nevertheless, since the stepsequence is the same for each direction, this can lead to bad results…
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…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient…
In this paper, we show that SVRG and SARAH can be modified to be fundamentally faster than all of the other standard algorithms that minimize the sum of $n$ smooth functions, such as SAGA, SAG, SDCA, and SDCA without duality. Most finite…
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…
The performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) depends critically on how learning rates are tuned and decreased over time. We propose a method to automatically adjust multiple learning rates so as to minimize the expected error at any…
Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a classical algorithm that has had since the early days a huge impact on signal processing, and nowadays on machine learning, due to the necessity to deal with a large amount of data observed with…
Variance-reduced gradient estimators for policy gradient methods have been one of the main focus of research in the reinforcement learning in recent years as they allow acceleration of the estimation process. We propose a variance-reduced…
Stochastic variational inference algorithms are derived for fitting various heteroskedastic time series models. We examine Gaussian, t, and skew-t response GARCH models and fit these using Gaussian variational approximating densities. We…
When solving finite-sum minimization problems, two common alternatives to stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with theoretical benefits are random reshuffling (SGD-RR) and shuffle-once (SGD-SO), in which functions are sampled in cycles…
We study the generalization error of randomized learning algorithms -- focusing on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) -- using a novel combination of PAC-Bayes and algorithmic stability. Importantly, our generalization bounds hold for all…
Recent work has established an empirically successful framework for adapting learning rates for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). This effectively removes all needs for tuning, while automatically reducing learning rates over time on…
In recent years, there has been considerable interest in designing stochastic first-order algorithms to tackle finite-sum smooth minimax problems. To obtain the gradient estimates, one typically relies on the uniform…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
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…