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In developing efficient optimization algorithms, it is crucial to account for communication constraints -- a significant challenge in modern Federated Learning. The best-known communication complexity among non-accelerated algorithms is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Xiaowen Jiang , Anton Rodomanov , Sebastian U. Stich

This paper studies a compressed momentum-based single-point zeroth-order algorithm for stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization, aiming to alleviate communication overhead and address the unavailability of explicit gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Linjing Chen , Antai Xie , Xinlei Yi , Xiaoqiang Ren , Xiaofan Wang

In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-16 Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Saeed Ghadimi

Federated learning is a useful framework for centralized learning from distributed data under practical considerations of heterogeneity, asynchrony, and privacy. Federated architectures are frequently deployed in deep learning settings,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Stefan Vlaski , Elsa Rizk , Ali H. Sayed

We study stochastic nonconvex optimization under heavy-tailed noise. In this setting, the stochastic gradients only have bounded $p$-th central moment ($p$-BCM) for some $p \in (1,2]$. Building on the foundational work of Arjevani et al.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-01 Adrien Fradin , Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Laurent Condat , Peter Richtárik

Recent developments on large-scale distributed machine learning applications, e.g., deep neural networks, benefit enormously from the advances in distributed non-convex optimization techniques, e.g., distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-13 Hao Yu , Rong Jin , Sen Yang

This paper develops a unified distributed method for solving two classes of constrained networked optimization problems, i.e., optimal consensus problem and resource allocation problem with non-identical set constraints. We first transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-17 Yi Huang , Ziyang Meng , Jian Sun , Wei Ren

Distributed parallel stochastic gradient descent algorithms are workhorses for large scale machine learning tasks. Among them, local stochastic gradient descent (Local SGD) has attracted significant attention due to its low communication…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Shuheng Shen , Yifei Cheng , Jingchang Liu , Linli Xu

We study distributed algorithms for expected loss minimization where the datasets are large and have to be stored on different machines. Often we deal with minimizing the average of a set of convex functions where each function is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-24 Samira Sheikhi

Learning representation from relative similarity comparisons, often called ordinal embedding, gains rising attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods are batch methods designed mainly based on the convex optimization, say, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-01 Ke Ma , Jinshan Zeng , Jiechao Xiong , Qianqian Xu , Xiaochun Cao , Wei Liu , Yuan Yao

In recent years, random subspace methods have been actively studied for large-dimensional nonconvex problems. Recent subspace methods have improved theoretical guarantees such as iteration complexity and local convergence rate while…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-25 Rei Higuchi , Pierre-Louis Poirion , Akiko Takeda

We address nonconvex learning problems over undirected networks. In particular, we focus on the challenge of designing an algorithm that is both communication-efficient and that guarantees the privacy of the agents' data. The first goal is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Xiaoxing Ren , Yuwen Ma , Nicola Bastianello , Karl H. Johansson , Thomas Parisini , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

We provide the first theoretical analysis on the convergence rate of the asynchronous stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) descent algorithm on non-convex optimization. Recent studies have shown that the asynchronous stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-21 Zhouyuan Huo , Heng Huang

We analyze the variance of stochastic gradients along negative curvature directions in certain non-convex machine learning models and show that stochastic gradients exhibit a strong component along these directions. Furthermore, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Hadi Daneshmand , Jonas Kohler , Aurelien Lucchi , Thomas Hofmann

Policy gradient (PG) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its scalability and good performance. In recent years, several variance-reduced PG methods have been proposed with a theoretical guarantee of converging to an approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Sadegh Khorasani , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash , Niao He , Matthias Grossglauser

We study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-04-06 Sashank J. Reddi , Ahmed Hefny , Suvrit Sra , Barnabas Poczos , Alex Smola

In this paper, we propose a variant of Riemannian stochastic recursive gradient method that can achieve second-order convergence guarantee and escape saddle points using simple perturbation. The idea is to perturb the iterates when gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-30 Andi Han , Junbin Gao

This paper investigates accelerating the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on non-convex problems. We propose a distributed primal-dual stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) equipped with "powerball" method to accelerate. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-15 Shengjun Zhang , Colleen P. Bailey

Machine learning problems such as neural network training, tensor decomposition, and matrix factorization, require local minimization of a nonconvex function. This local minimization is challenged by the presence of saddle points, of which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-07-23 Santiago Paternain , Aryan Mokhtari , Alejandro Ribeiro

Support vector regression (SVR) is one of the most popular machine learning algorithms aiming to generate the optimal regression curve through maximizing the minimal margin of selected training samples, i.e., support vectors. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-07 Gaoyang Li , Jinyu Yang , Chunguo Wu , Qin Ma