Related papers: Stochastic Second-Order Methods Improve Best-Known…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
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…
In view of a direct and simple improvement of vanilla SGD, this paper presents a fine-tuning of its step-sizes in the mini-batch case. For doing so, one estimates curvature, based on a local quadratic model and using only noisy gradient…
In this work, we develop new optimization algorithms that use approximate second-order information combined with the gradient regularization technique to achieve fast global convergence rates for both convex and non-convex objectives. The…
In this paper, we propose a novel kernel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for large-scale supervised learning with general losses. Compared to traditional kernel SGD, our algorithm improves efficiency and scalability through an…
Is it possible for a first-order method, i.e., only first derivatives allowed, to be quadratically convergent? For univariate loss functions, the answer is yes -- the Steffensen method avoids second derivatives and is still quadratically…
Stochastic gradient descent is one of the most successful approaches for solving large-scale problems, especially in machine learning and statistics. At each iteration, it employs an unbiased estimator of the full gradient computed from one…
This work considers optimization of composition of functions in a nested form over Riemannian manifolds where each function contains an expectation. This type of problems is gaining popularity in applications such as policy evaluation in…
In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…
Optimization plays a key role in machine learning. Recently, stochastic second-order methods have attracted much attention due to their low computational cost in each iteration. However, these algorithms might perform poorly especially if…
Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is a classical optimization method. Although it is theoretically proved to have better convergence performance than stochastic gradient descent (SGD), the generalization performance of SVRG…
In this paper, we study smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization problems, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions. We assume access to noisy evaluations of the functions and their gradients,…
We present the SCR framework for enhancing the training of graph neural networks (GNNs) with consistency regularization. Regularization is a set of strategies used in Machine Learning to reduce overfitting and improve the generalization…
Stochastic optimization is a cornerstone of modern machine learning. This paper studies the generalization performance of two classical stochastic optimization algorithms: stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Nesterov's accelerated…
Smoothed functional (SF) schemes for gradient estimation are known to be efficient in stochastic optimization algorithms, specially when the objective is to improve the performance of a stochastic system. However, the performance of these…
Stochastic neural networks (SNNs) are random functions whose predictions are gained by averaging over multiple realizations. Consequently, a gradient-based adversarial example is calculated based on one set of samples and its classification…
We propose a stochastic variance-reduced cubic regularized Newton algorithm to optimize the finite-sum problem over a Riemannian submanifold of the Euclidean space. The proposed algorithm requires a full gradient and Hessian update at the…
In this paper, we propose Selective Output Smoothing Regularization, a novel regularization method for training the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Inspired by the diverse effects on training from different samples, Selective Output…
Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…
Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…