Related papers: The Modified MSA, a Gradient Flow and Convergence

In this work we introduce a new optimisation method called SAGA in the spirit of SAG, SDCA, MISO and SVRG, a set of recently proposed incremental gradient algorithms with fast linear convergence rates. SAGA improves on the theory behind SAG…

Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…

We study PCA as a stochastic optimization problem and propose a novel stochastic approximation algorithm which we refer to as "Matrix Stochastic Gradient" (MSG), as well as a practical variant, Capped MSG. We study the method both…

Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) have been widely used for solving stochastic optimization problems. A majority of existing works assume no constraints or easy-to-project constraints. In this paper, we consider convex stochastic…

The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…

We present a new feasible proximal gradient method for constrained optimization where both the objective and constraint functions are given by the summation of a smooth, possibly nonconvex function and a convex simple function. The…

We study sampling as optimization in the space of measures. We focus on gradient flow-based optimization with the Langevin dynamics as a case study. We investigate the source of the bias of the unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) in…

Stochastic approximation (SA) is a key method used in statistical learning. Recently, its non-asymptotic convergence analysis has been considered in many papers. However, most of the prior analyses are made under restrictive assumptions…

This paper considers mean square error (MSE) analysis for stochastic gradient sampling algorithms applied to underdamped Langevin dynamics under a global convexity assumption. A novel discrete Poisson equation framework is developed to…

We consider a class of stochastic gradient optimization schemes. Assuming that the objective function is strongly convex, we prove weak error estimates which are uniform in time for the error between the solution of the numerical scheme,…

In machine learning, nonconvex optimization problems with multiple local optimums are often encountered. Graduated Optimization Algorithm (GOA) is a popular heuristic method to obtain global optimums of nonconvex problems through…

The recent advancement of foundation models (FMs) has brought about a paradigm shift, revolutionizing various sectors worldwide. The popular optimizers used to train these models are stochastic gradient descent-based algorithms, which face…

We introduce Multi-Iteration Stochastic Optimizers, a novel class of first-order stochastic methods that control the relative $L^2$ error using successive control variates along the iteration path. By exploiting correlations between…

This paper considers the problem of minimizing an expectation function over a closed convex set, coupled with a {\color{black} functional or expectation} constraint on either decision variables or problem parameters. We first present a new…

Stochastic variance reduced optimization methods are known to be globally convergent while they suffer from slow local convergence, especially when moderate or high accuracy is needed. To alleviate this problem, we propose an optimization…

Optimization is at the heart of machine learning, statistics and many applied scientific disciplines. It also has a long history in physics, ranging from the minimal action principle to finding ground states of disordered systems such as…

We consider saddle point problems which objective functions are the average of $n$ strongly convex-concave individual components. Recently, researchers exploit variance reduction methods to solve such problems and achieve linear-convergence…

This paper studies the Nesterov-Spokoiny Acceleration (NSA), a variant of the accelerated gradient method by Nesterov and Spokoiny. For smooth convex optimization, NSA achieves a strict $o(1/k^2)$ convergence rate in function value and an…

Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem,…

Proximal gradient algorithms (PGA), while foundational for inverse problems like image reconstruction, often yield unstable convergence and suboptimal solutions by violating the critical non-negativity constraint. We identify the gradient…