Related papers: Stochastic Second-Order Methods Improve Best-Known…
Cubic regularized Newton (CRN) methods have attracted signiffcant research interest because they offer stronger solution guarantees and lower iteration complexity. With the rise of the big-data era, there is growing interest in developing…
Stochastic variance reduction has proven effective at accelerating first-order algorithms for solving convex finite-sum optimization tasks such as empirical risk minimization. Incorporating second-order information has proven helpful in…
This paper addresses the optimization problem of minimizing non-convex continuous functions, which is relevant in the context of high-dimensional machine learning applications characterized by over-parametrization. We analyze a randomized…
We consider the problem of control in the setting of reinforcement learning (RL), where model information is not available. Policy gradient algorithms are a popular solution approach for this problem and are usually shown to converge to a…
We present two new remarkably simple stochastic second-order methods for minimizing the average of a very large number of sufficiently smooth and strongly convex functions. The first is a stochastic variant of Newton's method (SN), and the…
We revisit the classical problem of finding an approximately stationary point of the average of $n$ smooth and possibly nonconvex functions. The optimal complexity of stochastic first-order methods in terms of the number of gradient…
In this paper, we study a second-order approach to policy optimization in reinforcement learning. Existing second-order methods often suffer from suboptimal sample complexity or rely on unrealistic assumptions about importance sampling. To…
Cubic regularization (CR) is an optimization method with emerging popularity due to its capability to escape saddle points and converge to second-order stationary solutions for nonconvex optimization. However, CR encounters a high sample…
While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…
Gradient dominance property is a condition weaker than strong convexity, yet sufficiently ensures global convergence even in non-convex optimization. This property finds wide applications in machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL),…
We show that, for finite-sum minimization problems, incorporating partial second-order information of the objective function can dramatically improve the robustness to mini-batch size of variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods, making…
In this paper, we propose a new randomized second-order optimization algorithm---Stochastic Subspace Cubic Newton (SSCN)---for minimizing a high dimensional convex function $f$. Our method can be seen both as a {\em stochastic} extension of…
Stochastic optimization methods have become a class of popular optimization tools in machine learning. Especially, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely used for machine learning problems such as training neural networks due to…
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 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…
First-order methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are currently the standard algorithm for training deep neural networks. Second-order methods, despite their better convergence rate, are rarely used in practice due to the…
In this paper, we propose a first second-order scheme based on arbitrary non-Euclidean norms, incorporated by Bregman distances. They are introduced directly in the Newton iterate with regularization parameter proportional to the square…
We consider a regularized expected reward optimization problem in the non-oblivious setting that covers many existing problems in reinforcement learning (RL). In order to solve such an optimization problem, we apply and analyze the…
We propose a stochastic variance-reduced cubic regularized Newton method for non-convex optimization. At the core of our algorithm is a novel semi-stochastic gradient along with a semi-stochastic Hessian, which are specifically designed for…
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…