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Related papers: Gradient descent with a general cost

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Interpreting gradient methods as fixed-point iterations, we provide a detailed analysis of those methods for minimizing convex objective functions. Due to their conceptual and algorithmic simplicity, gradient methods are widely used in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-08-16 Alexander Jung

In this paper, we propose Riemannian conditional gradient methods for minimizing composite functions, i.e., those that can be expressed as the sum of a smooth function and a retraction-based convex function. We analyze the convergence of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Kangming Chen , Ellen H. Fukuda

Gradient descent optimization algorithms, while increasingly popular, are often used as black-box optimizers, as practical explanations of their strengths and weaknesses are hard to come by. This article aims to provide the reader with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-16 Sebastian Ruder

We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-27 Shuyao Li , Stephen J. Wright

Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-27 Ahmed Khaled , Peter Richtárik

Newton's method may exhibit slower convergence than vanilla Gradient Descent in its initial phase on strongly convex problems. Classical Newton-type multilevel methods mitigate this but, like Gradient Descent, achieve only linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-25 Nick Tsipinakis , Panos Parpas , Matthias Voigt

Newton's method may exhibit slower convergence than vanilla Gradient Descent in its initial phase on strongly convex problems. Classical Newton-type multilevel methods mitigate this but, like Gradient Descent, achieve only linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-05 Nick Tsipinakis , Panagiotis Tigkas , Panos Parpas

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-21 Fabio Nobile , Matteo Raviola , Nathan Schaeffer

This paper investigates distributed zeroth-order optimization for smooth nonconvex problems, targeting the trade-off between convergence rate and sampling cost per zeroth-order gradient estimation in current algorithms that use either the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-10 Huaiyi Mu , Yujie Tang , Jie Song , Zhongkui Li

The study of first-order optimization is sensitive to the assumptions made on the objective functions. These assumptions induce complexity classes which play a key role in worst-case analysis, including the fundamental concept of algorithm…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-30 Charles Guille-Escuret , Adam Ibrahim , Baptiste Goujaud , Ioannis Mitliagkas

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,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-12 Dimitris Boskos , Jorge Cortés , Sonia Martínez

We propose a new randomized coordinate descent method for a convex optimization template with broad applications. Our analysis relies on a novel combination of four ideas applied to the primal-dual gap function: smoothing, acceleration,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-10 Ahmet Alacaoglu , Quoc Tran-Dinh , Olivier Fercoq , Volkan Cevher

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Yunwen Lei , Ting Hu , Guiying Li , Ke Tang

Many problems in geometric optics or convex geometry can be recast as optimal transport problems: this includes the far-field reflector problem, Alexandrov's curvature prescription problem, etc. A popular way to solve these problems…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-03-08 Jun Kitagawa , Quentin Mérigot , Boris Thibert

Using backpropagation to compute gradients of objective functions for optimization has remained a mainstay of machine learning. Backpropagation, or reverse-mode differentiation, is a special case within the general family of automatic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Atılım Güneş Baydin , Barak A. Pearlmutter , Don Syme , Frank Wood , Philip Torr

Classical optimisation theory guarantees monotonic objective decrease for gradient descent (GD) when employed in a small step size, or ``stable", regime. In contrast, gradient descent on neural networks is frequently performed in a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Lachlan Ewen MacDonald , Hancheng Min , Leandro Palma , Salma Tarmoun , Ziqing Xu , René Vidal

In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing continuous submodular functions that naturally arise in many learning applications such as those involving utility functions in active learning and sensing, matrix approximations and network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-16 Hamed Hassani , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Amin Karbasi

We propose an optimization method for minimizing the finite sums of smooth convex functions. Our method incorporates an accelerated gradient descent (AGD) and a stochastic variance reduction gradient (SVRG) in a mini-batch setting. Unlike…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-11 Atsushi Nitanda

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-10-27 Guanghui Lan

Gradient restarting has been shown to improve the numerical performance of accelerated gradient methods. This paper provides a mathematical analysis to understand these advantages. First, we establish global linear convergence guarantees…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-28 Chenglong Bao , Liang Chen , Jiahong Li , Zuowei Shen