Related papers: Stochastic Second-Order Methods Improve Best-Known…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…
Natural policy gradient methods are popular reinforcement learning methods that improve the stability of policy gradient methods by utilizing second-order approximations to precondition the gradient with the inverse of the…
We establish or refute the optimality of inexact second-order methods for unconstrained nonconvex optimization from the point of view of worst-case evaluation complexity, improving and generalizing the results of Cartis, Gould and Toint…
Stochastic configuration networks (SCNs), as a class of randomized learner models, are featured by its way of random parameters assignment in the light of a supervisory mechanism, resulting in the universal approximation property at…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the method of choice in many machine learning tasks thanks to its scalability and efficiency in dealing with large-scale problems. In this paper, we focus on the shuffling version of SGD which…
Stochastic first-order methods for empirical risk minimization employ gradient approximations based on sampled data in lieu of exact gradients. Such constructions introduce noise into the learning dynamics, which can be corrected through…
Semi-supervised ordinal regression (S$^2$OR) problems are ubiquitous in real-world applications, where only a few ordered instances are labeled and massive instances remain unlabeled. Recent researches have shown that directly optimizing…
In this paper we measured the stability of stochastic gradient method (SGM) for learning an approximated Fourier primal support vector machine. The stability of an algorithm is considered by measuring the generalization error in terms of…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…
While first-order methods are popular for solving optimization problems that arise in large-scale deep learning problems, they come with some acute deficiencies. To diminish such shortcomings, there has been recent interest in applying…
In this paper we consider stochastic composite convex optimization problems with the objective function satisfying a stochastic bounded gradient condition, with or without a quadratic functional growth property. These models include the…
Neural network optimization remains one of the most consequential yet poorly understood challenges in modern AI research, where improvements in training algorithms can lead to enhanced feature learning in foundation models,…
In reinforcement learning (RL), it is often advantageous to consider additional constraints on the action space to ensure safety or action relevance. Existing work on such action-constrained RL faces challenges regarding effective policy…
In this paper a robust second-order method is developed for the solution of strongly convex l1-regularized problems. The main aim is to make the proposed method as inexpensive as possible, while even difficult problems can be efficiently…
In this paper, we try to uncover the second-order essence of several first-order optimization methods. For Nesterov Accelerated Gradient, we rigorously prove that the algorithm makes use of the difference between past and current gradients,…
We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…
We consider the problem of finding an approximate second-order stationary point of a constrained non-convex optimization problem. We first show that, unlike the gradient descent method for unconstrained optimization, the vanilla projected…
We propose a new algorithm for minimizing regularized empirical loss: Stochastic Dual Newton Ascent (SDNA). Our method is dual in nature: in each iteration we update a random subset of the dual variables. However, unlike existing methods…
Stochastic gradient algorithms have been the main focus of large-scale learning problems and they led to important successes in machine learning. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of learning rate and the amount of the…