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In machine learning, nonconvex optimization problems with multiple local optimums are often encountered. Graduated Optimization Algorithm (GOA) is a popular heuristic method to obtain global optimums of nonconvex problems through…
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,…
Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…
Variance reduction (VR) methods boost the performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by enabling the use of larger, constant stepsizes and preserving linear convergence rates. However, current variance reduced SGD methods require…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
Stochastic optimization algorithms are widely used for machine learning with large-scale data. However, their convergence often suffers from non-vanishing variance. Variance Reduction (VR) methods, such as SVRG and SARAH, address this issue…
Hierarchical optimization refers to problems with interdependent decision variables and objectives, such as minimax and bilevel formulations. While various algorithms have been proposed, existing methods and analyses lack adaptivity in…
Stochastic gradient descent (\textsc{Sgd}) methods are the most powerful optimization tools in training machine learning and deep learning models. Moreover, acceleration (a.k.a. momentum) methods and diagonal scaling (a.k.a. adaptive…
We introduce Kalman Gradient Descent, a stochastic optimization algorithm that uses Kalman filtering to adaptively reduce gradient variance in stochastic gradient descent by filtering the gradient estimates. We present both a theoretical…
We develop a new primitive for stochastic optimization: a low-bias, low-cost estimator of the minimizer $x_\star$ of any Lipschitz strongly-convex function. In particular, we use a multilevel Monte-Carlo approach due to Blanchet and Glynn…
Stochastic variance reduced methods have shown strong performance in solving finite-sum problems. However, these methods usually require the users to manually tune the step-size, which is time-consuming or even infeasible for some…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function that is evolving according to unknown and possibly stochastic dynamics, which may depend jointly on time and on the decision variable itself. Such problems abound in the machine…
We propose a stochastic trust-region method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization that incorporates stochastic variance-reduced gradients (SVRG) to accelerate convergence. Unlike classical trust-region methods, the proposed algorithm…
We propose a new variant of AMSGrad, a popular adaptive gradient based optimization algorithm widely used for training deep neural networks. Our algorithm adds prior knowledge about the sequence of consecutive mini-batch gradients and…
In this paper, a gradient-free distributed algorithm is introduced to solve a set constrained optimization problem under a directed communication network. Specifically, at each time-step, the agents locally compute a so-called…
We introduce Gradient Agreement Filtering (GAF) to improve on gradient averaging in distributed deep learning optimization. Traditional distributed data-parallel stochastic gradient descent involves averaging gradients of microbatches to…
This work characterizes the benefits of averaging schemes widely used in conjunction with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In particular, this work provides a sharp analysis of: (1) mini-batching, a method of averaging many samples of a…
We introduce deterministic perturbation schemes for the recently proposed random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA) [17], and propose new first-order and second-order algorithms. In the latter case, these are the first second-order…
We develop new stochastic gradient methods for efficiently solving sparse linear regression in a partial attribute observation setting, where learners are only allowed to observe a fixed number of actively chosen attributes per example at…