Related papers: An efficient and robust SAV based algorithm for di…
This paper proposes a finite element scheme, based on the Scalar Auxiliary Variable (SAV) approach, for the Cahn-Hilliard equation--a model that possesses significant physical relevance and a rich mathematical structure. A convergence…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic search algorithm for solving general optimization problems with little structure. The algorithm iteratively finds high quality solutions by randomly sampling candidate solutions from a parameterized…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is an optimizer that takes a descent step based on the gradient at a perturbation $y_t = x_t + \rho \frac{\nabla f(x_t)}{\lVert \nabla f(x_t) \rVert}$ of the current point $x_t$. Existing studies prove…
In this work we explore the fundamental structure-adaptiveness of state of the art randomized first order algorithms on regularized empirical risk minimization tasks, where the solution has intrinsic low-dimensional structure (such as…
Accelerated gradient methods are the cornerstones of large-scale, data-driven optimization problems that arise naturally in machine learning and other fields concerning data analysis. We introduce a gradient-based optimization framework for…
We propose a stochastic conditional gradient method (CGM) for minimizing convex finite-sum objectives formed as a sum of smooth and non-smooth terms. Existing CGM variants for this template either suffer from slow convergence rates, or…
In this paper, we present a novel derivative-free optimization framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Many problems in fields ranging from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning involve settings…
Two new stochastic variance-reduced algorithms named SARAH and SPIDER have been recently proposed, and SPIDER has been shown to achieve a near-optimal gradient oracle complexity for nonconvex optimization. However, the theoretical advantage…
Gradient descent is an important class of iterative algorithms for minimizing convex functions. Classically, gradient descent has been a sequential and synchronous process. Distributed and asynchronous variants of gradient descent have been…
In this paper we introduce Feature Gradients, a gradient-based search algorithm for feature selection. Our approach extends a recent result on the estimation of learnability in the sublinear data regime by showing that the calculation can…
Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM), which searches for flat minima by min-max optimization, has been shown to be useful in improving model generalization. However, since each SAM update requires computing two gradients, its computational…
We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…
We develop the method of stochastic modified equations (SME), in which stochastic gradient algorithms are approximated in the weak sense by continuous-time stochastic differential equations. We exploit the continuous formulation together…
We firstly propose the new stochastic gradient estimate of unbiasedness and minimized variance in this paper. Secondly, we propose the two algorithms: Algorithml and Algorithm2 which apply the new stochastic gradient estimate to modern…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a widely-used approach to learn models that are robust against distribution shift. Compared with the standard optimization setting, the objective function in DRO is more difficult to optimize,…
Optimization algorithms are pivotal in advancing various scientific and industrial fields but often encounter obstacles such as trapping in local minima, saddle points, and plateaus (flat regions), which makes the convergence to reasonable…
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to speed-up the convergence of accelerated proximal gradient (APG) methods. In order to minimize a convex function $f(\mathbf{x})$, our algorithm introduces a simple line search step after each…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
Stochastic gradient algorithms are the main focus of large-scale optimization problems and led to important successes in the recent advancement of the deep learning algorithms. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of…
We introduce a general method for improving the convergence rate of gradient-based optimizers that is easy to implement and works well in practice. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in a range of optimization problems by…