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We study stochastic algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems with a convex yet possibly nonsmooth regularizer, which find wide applications in many practical machine learning applications. However, compared to asynchronous…
Adaptive gradient methods, such as AdaGrad, are among the most successful optimization algorithms for neural network training. While these methods are known to achieve better dimensional dependence than stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for…
In this paper, we investigate the non-asymptotic stationary convergence behavior of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) for nonconvex optimization. We focus on a general class of nonconvex nonsmooth stochastic optimization problems, in which…
This is a handbook of simple proofs of the convergence of gradient and stochastic gradient descent type methods. We consider functions that are Lipschitz, smooth, convex, strongly convex, and/or Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz functions. Our focus is…
Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) enables scalable distributed training but suffers from gradient staleness. Existing mitigation strategies, such as delay-adaptive learning rates and staleness-aware filtering, typically…
Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has become the standard algorithm for training machine learning models with rigorous privacy guarantees. Despite its widespread use, the theoretical understanding of its long-run…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental algorithm in machine learning, representing the optimization backbone for training several classic models, from regression to neural networks. Given the recent practical focus on…
In this paper, we establish explicit convergence rates for the stochastic smooth approximations of infimal convolutions introduced and developed in \cite{MR4581306,MR4923371}. In particular, we quantify the convergence of the associated…
Block coordinate descent is a powerful algorithmic template suitable for big data optimization. This template admits a lot of variants including block gradient descent (BGD), which performs gradient descent on a selected block of variables,…
Motivated by the problem of online canonical correlation analysis, we propose the \emph{Stochastic Scaled-Gradient Descent} (SSGD) algorithm for minimizing the expectation of a stochastic function over a generic Riemannian manifold. SSGD…
Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a popular parallel optimization algorithm in machine learning. Most theoretical analysis on ASGD take a discrete view and prove upper bounds for their convergence rates. However, the…
We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…
We develop a high-dimensional scaling limit for Stochastic Gradient Descent with Polyak Momentum (SGD-M) and adaptive step-sizes. This provides a framework to rigourously compare online SGD with some of its popular variants. We show that…
Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…
Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…
Modern machine learning often requires training with large batch size, distributed data, and massively parallel compute hardware (like mobile and other edge devices or distributed data centers). Communication becomes a major bottleneck in…
We study the convergence of accelerated stochastic gradient descent for strongly convex objectives under the growth condition, which states that the variance of stochastic gradient is bounded by a multiplicative part that grows with the…
We study a continuous-time approximation of the stochastic gradient descent process for minimizing the population expected loss in learning problems. The main results establish general sufficient conditions for the convergence, extending…
Accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a workhorse in deep learning and often achieves better generalization performance than SGD. However, existing optimization theory can only explain the faster convergence of ASGD, but cannot…
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.…