Related papers: Accelerated stochastic approximation with state-de…
One of the most widely used methods for solving large-scale stochastic optimization problems is distributed asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (DASGD), a family of algorithms that result from parallelizing stochastic gradient descent…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely adopted iterative method for optimizing differentiable objective functions. In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach to scale up SGD in applications involving non-convex functions…
Recent empirical evidence indicates that many machine learning applications involve heavy-tailed gradient noise, which challenges the standard assumptions of bounded variance in stochastic optimization. Gradient clipping has emerged as a…
In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original SVRG, called variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Unlike the choices of snapshot and starting points in SVRG and its proximal variant, Prox-SVRG, the two vectors…
We aim to make stochastic gradient descent (SGD) adaptive to (i) the noise $\sigma^2$ in the stochastic gradients and (ii) problem-dependent constants. When minimizing smooth, strongly-convex functions with condition number $\kappa$, we…
A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The…
This paper investigates the problems large-scale distributed composite convex optimization, with motivations from a broad range of applications, including multi-agent systems, federated learning, smart grids, wireless sensor networks,…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…
We study Stochastic Gradient Descent with AdaGrad stepsizes: a popular adaptive (self-tuning) method for first-order stochastic optimization. Despite being well studied, existing analyses of this method suffer from various shortcomings:…
An increasing number of machine learning problems, such as robust or adversarial variants of existing algorithms, require minimizing a loss function that is itself defined as a maximum. Carrying a loop of stochastic gradient ascent (SGA)…
We consider smooth stochastic convex optimization problems in the context of algorithms which are based on directional derivatives of the objective function. This context can be considered as an intermediate one between derivative-free…
We consider a wide range of regularized stochastic minimization problems with two regularization terms, one of which is composed with a linear function. This optimization model abstracts a number of important applications in artificial…
Stochastic convex optimization algorithms are the most popular way to train machine learning models on large-scale data. Scaling up the training process of these models is crucial, but the most popular algorithm, Stochastic Gradient Descent…
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…
We present a novel gradient-free algorithm to solve a convex stochastic optimization problem, such as those encountered in medicine, physics, and machine learning (e.g., adversarial multi-armed bandit problem), where the objective function…
We introduce biased gradient oracles to capture a setting where the function measurements have an estimation error that can be controlled through a batch size parameter. Our proposed oracles are appealing in several practical contexts, for…
Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…
We propose a stochastic modified equations (SME) for modeling the asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) algorithms. The resulting SME of Langevin type extracts more information about the ASGD dynamics and elucidates the…
We study adaptive methods for differentially private convex optimization, proposing and analyzing differentially private variants of a Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm with adaptive stepsizes, as well as the AdaGrad algorithm. We…