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We present a new class of gradient-type optimization methods that extends vanilla gradient descent, mirror descent, Riemannian gradient descent, and natural gradient descent. Our approach involves constructing a surrogate for the objective…
For nonconvex objective functions, including those found in training deep neural networks, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum is said to converge faster and have better generalizability than SGD without momentum. In particular,…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
There are much recent interests in solving noncovnex min-max optimization problems due to its broad applications in many areas including machine learning, networked resource allocations, and distributed optimization. Perhaps, the most…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
Subspace learning and matrix factorization problems have great many applications in science and engineering, and efficient algorithms are critical as dataset sizes continue to grow. Many relevant problem formulations are non-convex, and in…
This paper studies decentralized optimization problem $f(\mathbf{x})=\frac{1}{m}\sum_{i=1}^m f_i(\mathbf{x})$, where each local function has the form of $f_i(\mathbf{x}) = {\mathbb E}\left[F(\mathbf{x};{\boldsymbol \xi}_i)\right]$ which is…
This paper considers non-smooth optimization problems where we seek to minimize the pointwise maximum of a continuously parameterized family of functions. Since the objective function is given as the solution to a maximization problem,…
This paper studies distributed nonconvex optimization problems with stochastic gradients for a multi-agent system, in which each agent aims to minimize the sum of all agents' cost functions by using local compressed information exchange. We…
In this work, we propose a novel adaptive stochastic gradient-free (ASGF) approach for solving high-dimensional nonconvex optimization problems based on function evaluations. We employ a directional Gaussian smoothing of the target function…
A stochastic-gradient-based interior-point algorithm for minimizing a continuously differentiable objective function (that may be nonconvex) subject to bound constraints is presented, analyzed, and demonstrated through experimental results.…
Gaussian smoothing (GS) is a derivative-free optimization (DFO) algorithm that estimates the gradient of an objective using perturbations of the current parameters sampled from a standard normal distribution. We generalize it to sampling…
Momentum Stochastic Gradient Descent (MSGD) algorithm has been widely applied to many nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, e.g., training deep neural networks, variational Bayesian inference, and etc. Despite its empirical…
In this paper, we present an adaptive gradient descent method for geodesically convex optimization on a Riemannian manifold with nonnegative sectional curvature. The method automatically adapts to the local geometry of the function and does…
We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…
Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a powerful algorithm for optimizing a non-convex objective, where a controlled and properly scaled Gaussian noise is added to the stochastic gradients to steer the iterates towards a global…
In this paper we analyze several new methods for solving nonconvex optimization problems with the objective function formed as a sum of two terms: one is nonconvex and smooth, and another is convex but simple and its structure is known.…
We study statistical inverse learning in the context of nonlinear inverse problems under random design. Specifically, we address a class of nonlinear problems by employing gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…
In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…