Related papers: Closing the gap between SVRG and TD-SVRG with Grad…

We study optimization algorithms based on variance reduction for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Remarkable recent progress has been made in this direction through development of algorithms like SAG, SVRG, SAGA. These algorithms have…

Stochastic gradient algorithms estimate the gradient based on only one or a few samples and enjoy low computational cost per iteration. They have been widely used in large-scale optimization problems. However, stochastic gradient algorithms…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a central tool in machine learning. We prove that SGD converges to zero loss, even with a fixed (non-vanishing) learning rate - in the special case of homogeneous linear classifiers with smooth monotone…

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…

Temporal difference (TD) learning is one of the main foundations of modern reinforcement learning. This paper studies the use of TD(0), a canonical TD algorithm, to estimate the value function of a given policy from a batch of data. In this…

Low-precision training has become crucial for reducing the computational and memory costs of large-scale deep learning. However, quantizing gradients introduces magnitude shrinkage, which can change how stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…

Gradient clipping is commonly used in training deep neural networks partly due to its practicability in relieving the exploding gradient problem. Recently, \citet{zhang2019gradient} show that clipped (stochastic) Gradient Descent (GD)…

To enable learning on edge devices with fast convergence and low memory, we present a novel backpropagation-free optimization algorithm dubbed Target Projection Stochastic Gradient Descent (tpSGD). tpSGD generalizes direct random target…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of modern machine learning. Sometimes, there are many different potential gradient estimators that can be used. When so, choosing the one with the best tradeoff between cost and variance is…

When training a machine learning model with observational data, it is often encountered that some values are systemically missing. Learning from the incomplete data in which the missingness depends on some covariates may lead to biased…

Recent work has established an empirically successful framework for adapting learning rates for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). This effectively removes all needs for tuning, while automatically reducing learning rates over time on…

This paper introduces Tempered Fractional Gradient Descent (TFGD), a novel optimization framework that synergizes fractional calculus with exponential tempering to enhance gradient-based learning. Traditional gradient descent methods often…

Embedding learning has found widespread applications in recommendation systems and natural language modeling, among other domains. To learn quality embeddings efficiently, adaptive learning rate algorithms have demonstrated superior…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm in machine learning, particularly for neural network training. Recent studies on SGD for canonical quadratic optimization or linear regression show it attains well generalization…

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…

Variance reduction (VR) techniques for convergence rate acceleration of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm have been developed with great efforts recently. VR's two variants, stochastic variance-reduced-gradient (SVRG-SGD) and…

Huge scale machine learning problems are nowadays tackled by distributed optimization algorithms, i.e. algorithms that leverage the compute power of many devices for training. The communication overhead is a key bottleneck that hinders…

Motivated by broad applications in machine learning, we study the popular accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) algorithm for solving (possibly nonconvex) optimization problems. We characterize the finite-time performance of this…

Off-policy learning enables a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to reason counterfactually about policies that are not executed and is one of the most important ideas in RL. It, however, can lead to instability when combined with function…