Related papers: Stochastic Steffensen method
This paper proposes a set of novel optimization algorithms for solving a class of convex optimization problems with time-varying streaming cost function. We develop an approach to track the optimal solution with a bounded error. Unlike the…
An algorithm is proposed for solving optimization problems with stochastic objective and deterministic equality and inequality constraints. This algorithm is objective-function-free in the sense that it only uses the objective's gradient…
Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) are one of the most potent parametric density models used extensively in many applications. Flexibly-tied factorization of the covariance matrices in GMMs is a powerful approach for coping with the challenges…
We consider the problem of optimising the expected value of a loss functional over a nonlinear model class of functions, assuming that we have only access to realisations of the gradient of the loss. This is a classical task in statistics,…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested experimentally for solving stochastic optimization problems in which the decision variables are constrained to satisfy equations defined by deterministic, smooth, and nonlinear functions. It is…
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…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…
This paper addresses the optimization problem of minimizing non-convex continuous functions, which is relevant in the context of high-dimensional machine learning applications characterized by over-parametrization. We analyze a randomized…
Invex programs are a special kind of non-convex problems which attain global minima at every stationary point. While classical first-order gradient descent methods can solve them, they converge very slowly. In this paper, we propose new…
Arising in semi-parametric statistics, control applications, and as sub-problems in global optimization methods, certain optimization problems can have objective functions requiring numerical integration to evaluate, yet gradient function…
In stochastic gradient descent, especially for neural network training, there are currently dominating first order methods: not modeling local distance to minimum. This information required for optimal step size is provided by second order…
In a recent paper, Bubeck, Lee, and Singh introduced a new first order method for minimizing smooth strongly convex functions. Their geometric descent algorithm, largely inspired by the ellipsoid method, enjoys the optimal linear rate of…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems with affine constraints and develop several methods using either primal or dual approach to solve it. In the primal case, we use a special penalization technique to make the initial…
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…
We study deterministic and stochastic primal-dual sub-gradient algorithms for distributed optimization of a separable objective function with global inequality constraints. In both algorithms, the norm of the Lagrangian multipliers are…
We design an algorithm which finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point (with $\|\nabla F(x)\|\le \epsilon$) using $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector products, matching guarantees that were previously available…
Risk minimization for nonsmooth nonconvex problems naturally leads to first-order sampling or, by an abuse of terminology, to stochastic subgradient descent. We establish the convergence of this method in the path-differentiable case and…
The convergence behaviour of first-order methods can be severely slowed down when applied to high-dimensional non-convex functions due to the presence of saddle points. If, additionally, the saddles are surrounded by large plateaus, it is…
The study of first-order optimization algorithms (FOA) typically starts with assumptions on the objective functions, most commonly smoothness and strong convexity. These metrics are used to tune the hyperparameters of FOA. We introduce a…
Machine learning practitioners invest significant manual and computational resources in finding suitable learning rates for optimization algorithms. We provide a probabilistic motivation, in terms of Gaussian inference, for popular…