Related papers: Generalized Polyak Step Size for First Order Optim…
The learning rate in stochastic gradient methods is a critical hyperparameter that is notoriously costly to tune via standard grid search, especially for training modern large-scale models with billions of parameters. We identify a…
The performance of standard stochastic approximation implementations can vary significantly based on the choice of the steplength sequence, and in general, little guidance is provided about good choices. Motivated by this gap, in the first…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
Commonly used optimization algorithms often show a trade-off between good generalization and fast training times. For instance, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) tends to have good generalization; however, adaptive gradient methods have…
Schedule-Free SGD, proposed in [Defazio et al., 2024], achieves optimal convergence rates without requiring the training horizon in advance, by replacing learning rate schedules with a principled form of iterate averaging. However, the…
Many machine learning applications and tasks rely on the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variants. Effective step length selection is crucial for the success of these algorithms, which has motivated the development of…
First-order stochastic methods are the state-of-the-art in large-scale machine learning optimization owing to efficient per-iteration complexity. Second-order methods, while able to provide faster convergence, have been much less explored…
When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…
The unprecedented growth of deep learning models has enabled remarkable advances but introduced substantial computational bottlenecks. A key factor contributing to training efficiency is batch-size and learning-rate scheduling in stochastic…
The Polyak stepsize has been proven to be a fundamental stepsize in convex optimization, giving near optimal gradient descent rates across a wide range of assumptions. The universality of the Polyak stepsize has also inspired many…
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,…
This paper studies a stochastic algorithm for linearly constrained nonconvex optimization, where the objective function is smooth but only unbiased stochastic gradients with bounded variance are available. We propose a momentum-based…
Momentum-based gradients are essential for optimizing advanced machine learning models, as they not only accelerate convergence but also advance optimizers to escape stationary points. While most state-of-the-art momentum techniques utilize…
In this paper, we design and analyze a new family of adaptive subgradient methods for solving an important class of weakly convex (possibly nonsmooth) stochastic optimization problems. Adaptive methods that use exponential moving averages…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), in which a momentum term is added to SGD, has been well studied in both theory and practice. The theoretical studies show that the settings of the learning rate and momentum weight affect…
In this paper, we present a unified algorithm for stochastic optimization that makes use of a "momentum" term; in other words, the stochastic gradient depends not only on the current true gradient of the objective function, but also on the…
The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…
We present adaptive gradient methods (both basic and accelerated) for solving convex composite optimization problems in which the main part is approximately smooth (a.k.a. $(\delta, L)$-smooth) and can be accessed only via a (potentially…
Stochastic gradient descent is a canonical tool for addressing stochastic optimization problems, and forms the bedrock of modern machine learning and statistics. In this work, we seek to balance the fact that attenuating step-size is…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic optimization method that adaptively controls the sample size used in the computation of gradient approximations. Unlike other variance reduction techniques that either require additional storage or the…