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Real-world optimization problems may have a different underlying structure. In black-box optimization, the dependencies between decision variables remain unknown. However, some techniques can discover such interactions accurately. In Large…
Stochastic compositional optimization generalizes classic (non-compositional) stochastic optimization to the minimization of compositions of functions. Each composition may introduce an additional expectation. The series of expectations may…
We analyze the convergence of gradient-based optimization algorithms that base their updates on delayed stochastic gradient information. The main application of our results is to the development of gradient-based distributed optimization…
Evaluation metrics in machine learning are often hardly taken as loss functions, as they could be non-differentiable and non-decomposable, e.g., average precision and F1 score. This paper aims to address this problem by revisiting the…
This work considers the problem of computing the canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) of large tensors. Prior works mostly leverage data sparsity to handle this problem, which is not suitable for handling dense tensors that often arise in…
Recent work has shown that standard training via empirical risk minimization (ERM) can produce models that achieve high accuracy on average but low accuracy on underrepresented groups due to the prevalence of spurious features. A…
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…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
Recent works in learning-integrated optimization have shown promise in settings where the optimization problem is only partially observed or where general-purpose optimizers perform poorly without expert tuning. By learning an optimizer…
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…
We present an algorithm for a class of statistical inference problems. The main idea is to reformulate the inference problem as an optimization procedure, based on the generation of surrogate (auxiliary) functions. This approach is…
This paper investigates the stochastic optimization problem with a focus on developing scalable parallel algorithms for deep learning tasks. Our solution involves a reformation of the objective function for stochastic optimization in neural…
The accuracy of information retrieval systems is often measured using complex loss functions such as the average precision (AP) or the normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG). Given a set of positive and negative samples, the…
SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent…
Many modern large-scale machine learning problems benefit from decentralized and stochastic optimization. Recent works have shown that utilizing both decentralized computing and local stochastic gradient estimates can outperform…
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
This paper proposes a constrained stochastic successive convex approximation (CSSCA) algorithm to find a stationary point for a general non-convex stochastic optimization problem, whose objective and constraint functions are non-convex and…
Many applications in machine learning require optimizing a function whose true gradient is unknown, but where surrogate gradient information (directions that may be correlated with, but not necessarily identical to, the true gradient) is…
In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…
Recently, several optimization methods have been successfully applied to the hyperparameter optimization of deep neural networks (DNNs). The methods work by modeling the joint distribution of hyperparameter values and corresponding error.…