Related papers: Extremely Fast Convergence Rates for Extremum Seek…

We consider binary classification problems with positive definite kernels and square loss, and study the convergence rates of stochastic gradient methods. We show that while the excess testing loss (squared loss) converges slowly to zero as…

An algorithm for unconstrained non-convex optimization is described, which does not evaluate the objective function and in which minimization is carried out, at each iteration, within a randomly selected subspace. It is shown that this…

Stochastic gradient descent is a canonical tool for addressing stochastic optimization problems, and forms the bedrock of modern machine learning and statistics. In this work, we seek to balance the fact that attenuating step-size is…

Consider convex optimization problems subject to a large number of constraints. We focus on stochastic problems in which the objective takes the form of expected values and the feasible set is the intersection of a large number of convex…

This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…

In this article we establish central limit theorems for multilevel Polyak-Ruppert averaged stochastic approximation schemes. We work under very mild technical assumptions and consider the slow regime in wich typical errors decay like…

We analyze the convergence rate of the random reshuffling (RR) method, which is a randomized first-order incremental algorithm for minimizing a finite sum of convex component functions. RR proceeds in cycles, picking a uniformly random…

We consider linear two-time-scale stochastic approximation algorithms driven by martingale noise. Recent applications in machine learning motivate the need to understand finite-time error rates, but conventional stochastic approximation…

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.…

We propose a first-order method for stochastic strongly convex optimization that attains $O(1/n)$ rate of convergence, analysis show that the proposed method is simple, easily to implement, and in worst case, asymptotically four times…

Most existing distance metric learning methods assume perfect side information that is usually given in pairwise or triplet constraints. Instead, in many real-world applications, the constraints are derived from side information, such as…

We propose a new stochastic coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of convex functions each of which depends on a small number of coordinates only. Our method (APPROX) is simultaneously Accelerated, Parallel and PROXimal; this is…

We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…

We study the rate of convergence of linear two-time-scale stochastic approximation methods. We consider two-time-scale linear iterations driven by i.i.d. noise, prove some results on their asymptotic covariance and establish asymptotic…

We investigate the convergence properties of the EM algorithm when applied to overspecified Gaussian mixture models -- that is, when the number of components in the fitted model exceeds that of the true underlying distribution. Focusing on…

The spectral risk has wide applications in machine learning, especially in real-world decision-making, where people are not only concerned with models' average performance. By assigning different weights to the losses of different sample…

A standard way to obtain convergence guarantees in stochastic convex optimization is to run an online learning algorithm and then output the average of its iterates: the actual iterates of the online learning algorithm do not come with…

We adapt the quasi-monotone method from [2] for composite convex minimization in the stochastic setting. For the proposed numerical scheme we derive the optimal convergence rate in terms of the last iterate, rather than on average as it is…

In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…

This paper presents the first convergence result for random search algorithms to a subset of the Pareto set of given maximum size k with bounds on the approximation quality. The core of the algorithm is a new selection criterion based on a…