Related papers: A non-monotone trust-region method with noisy orac…
Asynchronous distributed algorithms are a popular way to reduce synchronization costs in large-scale optimization, and in particular for neural network training. However, for nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives, few convergence guarantees…
We present a new accelerated stochastic second-order method that is robust to both gradient and Hessian inexactness, which occurs typically in machine learning. We establish theoretical lower bounds and prove that our algorithm achieves…
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…
This paper proposes a new family of algorithms for training neural networks (NNs). These are based on recent developments in the field of non-convex optimization, going under the general name of successive convex approximation (SCA)…
Many applications in machine learning or signal processing involve nonsmooth optimization problems. This nonsmoothness brings a low-dimensional structure to the optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a randomized proximal gradient…
In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…
Stochastic gradient-based optimization is crucial to optimize neural networks. While popular approaches heuristically adapt the step size and direction by rescaling gradients, a more principled approach to improve optimizers requires…
In this paper, we study a few challenging theoretical and numerical issues on the well known trust region policy optimization for deep reinforcement learning. The goal is to find a policy that maximizes the total expected reward when the…
A novel trust region method for solving linearly constrained nonlinear programs is presented. The proposed technique is amenable to a distributed implementation, as its salient ingredient is an alternating projected gradient sweep in place…
We present a stochastic optimization method that uses a fourth-order regularized model to find local minima of smooth and potentially non-convex objective functions with a finite-sum structure. This algorithm uses sub-sampled derivatives…
In this paper, we present a unified and general framework for analyzing the batch updating approach to nonlinear, high-dimensional optimization. The framework encompasses all the currently used batch updating approaches, and is applicable…
In this work, we develop analysis and algorithms for a class of (stochastic) bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level (LL) problem is strongly convex and linearly constrained. Most existing approaches for solving such problems rely…
We develop and analyze a method for stochastic simulation optimization based on Gaussian process models within a trust-region framework. We focus on settings where the variance of the objective function is large, making accurate estimation…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
In this paper, we propose a class of penalty methods with stochastic approximation for solving stochastic nonlinear programming problems. We assume that only noisy gradients or function values of the objective function are available via…
We consider the maximization of a submodular objective function $f:2^U\to\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}$, where the objective $f$ is not accessed as a value oracle but instead subject to noisy queries. We introduce a versatile adaptive sampling…
In this paper, we study stochastic non-convex optimization with non-convex random functions. Recent studies on non-convex optimization revolve around establishing second-order convergence, i.e., converging to a nearly second-order optimal…
Consider a network of $N$ decentralized computing agents collaboratively solving a nonconvex stochastic composite problem. In this work, we propose a single-loop algorithm, called DEEPSTORM, that achieves optimal sample complexity for this…
Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…
Training deep neural networks at scale can benefit from domain decomposition, where the network is split into subdomains trained in parallel and coupled by a global trust-region mechanism. Building on the Additively Preconditioned…