Related papers: A Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient using Barzi…

We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…

Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is…

Block coordinate descent methods and stochastic subgradient methods have been extensively studied in optimization and machine learning. By combining randomized block sampling with stochastic subgradient methods based on dual averaging, we…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a workhorse in machine learning, yet its slow convergence can be a computational bottleneck. Variance reduction techniques such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA have been proposed to overcome this weakness,…

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a general-purpose optimization-based sampling algorithm that has recently exploded in popularity, but is limited by two issues: it is known to produce biased samples, and it can be slow to…

Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…

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 novel limited-memory stochastic block BFGS update for incorporating enriched curvature information in stochastic approximation methods. In our method, the estimate of the inverse Hessian matrix that is maintained by it, is…

Problems in signal processing and medical imaging often lead to calculating sparse solutions to under-determined linear systems. Methodologies for solving this problem are presented as background to the method used in this work where the…

We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…

We investigate stochastic Bregman proximal gradient (SBPG) methods for minimizing a finite-sum nonconvex function $\Psi(x):=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^nf_i(x)+\phi(x)$, where $\phi$ is convex and nonsmooth, while $f_i$, instead of gradient…

Stochastic optimization algorithms are widely used for large-scale data analysis due to their low per-iteration costs, but they often suffer from slow asymptotic convergence caused by inherent variance. Variance-reduced techniques have been…

Stochastic Gradient Boosting (SGB) is a widely used approach to regularization of boosting models based on decision trees. It was shown that, in many cases, random sampling at each iteration can lead to better generalization performance of…

We present a modified limited memory BFGS (L-BFGS) method that converges globally and linearly for nonconvex objective functions. Its distinguishing feature is that it turns into L-BFGS if the iterates cluster at a point near which the…

In this paper, we propose a new non-monotone conjugate gradient method for solving unconstrained nonlinear optimization problems. We first modify the non-monotone line search method by introducing a new trigonometric function to calculate…

This paper proposes an accelerated proximal stochastic variance reduced gradient (ASVRG) method, in which we design a simple and effective momentum acceleration trick. Unlike most existing accelerated stochastic variance reduction methods…

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.…

In this paper, we propose a stochastic method for solving equality constrained optimization problems that utilizes predictive variance reduction. Specifically, we develop a method based on the sequential quadratic programming paradigm that…

Deep Q-learning algorithms often suffer from poor gradient estimations with an excessive variance, resulting in unstable training and poor sampling efficiency. Stochastic variance-reduced gradient methods such as SVRG have been applied to…

In this paper, we consider the unconstrained multiobjective optimization problem. In recent years, researchers pointed out that the steepest decent method may generate small stepsize which leads to slow convergence rates. To address the…