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Modern machine learning is trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD), whose performance critically depends on how the learning rate (LR) is adjusted and decreased over time. Yet existing LR regimes may be intricate, or need to tune one…

Gradient regularization (GR) has been shown to improve the generalizability of trained models. While Natural Gradient Descent has been shown to accelerate optimization in the initial phase of training, little attention has been paid to how…

The primary goal of my Ph.D. study is to develop provably efficient and practical algorithms for data-driven sequential decision-making under uncertainty. My work focuses on reinforcement learning (RL), multi-armed bandits, and their…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…

We present and analyze several strategies for improving the performance of stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods. We first show that the convergence rate of these methods can be preserved under a decreasing sequence of errors…

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…

We study optimization algorithms based on variance reduction for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Remarkable recent progress has been made in this direction through development of algorithms like SAG, SVRG, SAGA. These algorithms have…

Guessing random additive noise decoding (GRAND) is a recently proposed decoding paradigm particularly suitable for codes with short length and high rate. Among its variants, ordered reliability bits GRAND (ORBGRAND) exploits soft…

Based on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), the paper introduces two optimizers, named Interpolational Accelerating Gradient Descent (IAGD) as well as Noise-Regularized Stochastic Gradient Descent (NRSGD). IAGD leverages second-order Newton…

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…

In federated learning, data heterogeneity is a critical challenge. A straightforward solution is to shuffle the clients' data to homogenize the distribution. However, this may violate data access rights, and how and when shuffling can…

With advances in deep learning, exponential data growth and increasing model complexity, developing efficient optimization methods are attracting much research attention. Several implementations favor the use of Conjugate Gradient (CG) and…

Sequential computation via autoregressive generation can make difficult tasks learnable, but the generation order of intermediate states strongly affects whether training succeeds. We address the problem of discovering a learning-friendly…

We combine two advanced ideas widely used in optimization for machine learning: shuffling strategy and momentum technique to develop a novel shuffling gradient-based method with momentum, coined Shuffling Momentum Gradient (SMG), for…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…

Self-paced learning and hard example mining re-weight training instances to improve learning accuracy. This paper presents two improved alternatives based on lightweight estimates of sample uncertainty in stochastic gradient descent (SGD):…

Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used algorithms for large scale optimization problems. While classical theoretical analysis of SGD for convex problems studies (suffix) \emph{averages} of iterates and obtains…

An appealing property of the natural gradient is that it is invariant to arbitrary differentiable reparameterizations of the model. However, this invariance property requires infinitesimal steps and is lost in practical implementations with…

We propose matrix norm inequalities that extend the Recht-R\'e (2012) conjecture on a noncommutative AM-GM inequality by supplementing it with another inequality that accounts for single-shuffle, which is a widely used without-replacement…