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Stochastic optimization via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental problem in statistics and optimization. This paper revisits Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for strongly convex objectives, establishing tight, uniform-in-time…
This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance the performance of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm by incorporating a modified decay step size based on $\frac{1}{\sqrt{t}}$. The proposed step size integrates a logarithmic…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is an inherently sequential training algorithm--computing the gradient at batch $i$ depends on the model parameters learned from batch $i-1$. Prior approaches that break this dependence do not honor them…
Conditional stochastic optimization covers a variety of applications ranging from invariant learning and causal inference to meta-learning. However, constructing unbiased gradient estimators for such problems is challenging due to the…
We study the trade-offs between convergence rate and robustness to gradient errors in designing a first-order algorithm. We focus on gradient descent (GD) and accelerated gradient (AG) methods for minimizing strongly convex functions when…
Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…
Minimax optimal convergence rates for classes of stochastic convex optimization problems are well characterized, where the majority of results utilize iterate averaged stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with polynomially decaying step sizes.…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
The choice of step-size used in Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) optimization is empirically selected in most training procedures. Moreover, the use of scheduled learning techniques such as Step-Decaying, Cyclical-Learning, and Warmup to…
In this paper we study several classes of stochastic optimization algorithms enriched with heavy ball momentum. Among the methods studied are: stochastic gradient descent, stochastic Newton, stochastic proximal point and stochastic dual…
Establishing a fast rate of convergence for optimization methods is crucial to their applicability in practice. With the increasing popularity of deep learning over the past decade, stochastic gradient descent and its adaptive variants…
Adaptive gradient methods are workhorses in deep learning. However, the convergence guarantees of adaptive gradient methods for nonconvex optimization have not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we provide a fine-grained convergence…
We study the stochastic optimization problem from a continuous-time perspective, with a focus on the Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum (SGDM) method. We show that the trajectory of SGDM, despite its \emph{stochastic} nature,…
This paper investigates different vector step-size adaptation approaches for non-stationary online, continual prediction problems. Vanilla stochastic gradient descent can be considerably improved by scaling the update with a vector of…
We investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…
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 propose a stochastic optimization method for minimizing loss functions, expressed as an expected value, that adaptively controls the batch size used in the computation of gradient approximations and the step size used to move along such…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods are prominent for training machine learning and deep learning models. The performance of these techniques depends on their hyperparameter tuning over time and varies for different models and…
Many popular learning-rate schedules for deep neural networks combine a decaying trend with local perturbations that attempt to escape saddle points and bad local minima. We derive convergence guarantees for bandwidth-based step-sizes, a…
In the past several years, the last-iterate convergence of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm has triggered people's interest due to its good performance in practice but lack of theoretical understanding. For Lipschitz convex…