Related papers: Computationally Efficient and Statistically Optima…
The Hessian-vector product has been utilized to find a second-order stationary solution with strong complexity guarantee (e.g., almost linear time complexity in the problem's dimensionality). In this paper, we propose to further reduce the…
Robust low-rank matrix completion (RMC), or robust principal component analysis with partially observed data, has been studied extensively for computer vision, signal processing and machine learning applications. This problem aims to…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
This work studies applications and generalizations of a simple estimation technique that provides exponential concentration under heavy-tailed distributions, assuming only bounded low-order moments. We show that the technique can be used…
This paper studies decentralized stochastic nonconvex optimization problem over row-stochastic networks. We consider the heavy-tailed gradient noise which is empirically observed in many popular real-world applications. Specifically, we…
We propose a novel stochastic smoothing accelerated gradient (SSAG) method for general constrained nonsmooth convex composite optimization, and analyze the convergence rates. The SSAG method allows various smoothing techniques, and can deal…
In high-dimensional statistics, the Lasso is a cornerstone method for simultaneous variable selection and parameter estimation. However, its reliance on the squared loss function renders it highly sensitive to outliers and heavy-tailed…
We consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In the context of most machine learning applications, each loss function is non-negative and thus can be expressed as the…
We propose to use stochastic Riemannian coordinate descent on the orthogonal group for recurrent neural network training. The algorithm rotates successively two columns of the recurrent matrix, an operation that can be efficiently…
This paper delivers improved theoretical guarantees for the convex programming approach in low-rank matrix estimation, in the presence of (1) random noise, (2) gross sparse outliers, and (3) missing data. This problem, often dubbed as…
We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…
We analyze the convergence of a nonlocal gradient descent method for minimizing a class of high-dimensional non-convex functions, where a directional Gaussian smoothing (DGS) is proposed to define the nonlocal gradient (also referred to as…
We present an algorithm for minimizing a sum of functions that combines the computational efficiency of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with the second order curvature information leveraged by quasi-Newton methods. We unify these…
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…
The truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) of the measurement matrix is the optimal solution to the_representation_ problem of how to best approximate a noisy measurement matrix using a low-rank matrix. Here, we consider the…
We consider a distributionally robust formulation of stochastic optimization problems arising in statistical learning, where robustness is with respect to uncertainty in the underlying data distribution. Our formulation builds on…
Optimization over the Stiefel manifold is a fundamental computational problem in many scientific and engineering applications. Despite considerable research effort, high-dimensional optimization problems over the Stiefel manifold remain…
We propose an inexact optimization algorithm on Riemannian manifolds, motivated by quadratic discrimination tasks in high-dimensional, low-sample-size (HDLSS) imaging settings. In such applications, gradient evaluations are often biased due…
We study the stochastic Riemannian gradient algorithm for matrix eigen-decomposition. The state-of-the-art stochastic Riemannian algorithm requires the learning rate to decay to zero and thus suffers from slow convergence and sub-optimal…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…