Related papers: Finite-sum optimization: Adaptivity to smoothness …
This paper considers the robust phase retrieval, which can be cast as a nonsmooth and nonconvex composite optimization problem. We propose two first-order algorithms with adaptive step sizes: the subgradient algorithm (AdaSubGrad) and 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…
We propose a stochastic optimization method for minimizing loss functions, expressed as an expected value, that adaptively controls the batch size used in the computation of gradient approximations and the step size used to move along such…
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…
We propose a computationally-friendly adaptive learning rate schedule, "AdaLoss", which directly uses the information of the loss function to adjust the stepsize in gradient descent methods. We prove that this schedule enjoys linear…
Adaptive gradient methods like AdaGrad are widely used in optimizing neural networks. Yet, existing convergence guarantees for adaptive gradient methods require either convexity or smoothness, and, in the smooth setting, only guarantee…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform well in video understanding but degrade on long videos due to fixed-length context and weak long-term dependency modeling. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can expand knowledge…
Adaptive gradient methods have shown excellent performances for solving many machine learning problems. Although multiple adaptive gradient methods were recently studied, they mainly focus on either empirical or theoretical aspects and also…
Effectively integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous driving requires a balance between leveraging high-level reasoning and maintaining real-time efficiency. Existing approaches either activate LLMs too frequently, causing…
This article introduces a novel family of optimization algorithms - Anisotropic Gaussian Smoothing Gradient Descent (AGS-GD), AGS-Stochastic Gradient Descent (AGS-SGD), and AGS-Adam - that employ anisotropic Gaussian smoothing to enhance…
Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…
A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…
In federated learning (FL), model training performance is strongly impacted by data heterogeneity across clients. Client-drift compensation methods have recently emerged as a solution to this issue, introducing correction terms into local…
We provide the first theoretical analysis on the convergence rate of the asynchronous stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) descent algorithm on non-convex optimization. Recent studies have shown that the asynchronous stochastic…
In this work, we describe a generic approach to show convergence with high probability for both stochastic convex and non-convex optimization with sub-Gaussian noise. In previous works for convex optimization, either the convergence is only…
We study the conditions under which one is able to efficiently apply variance-reduction and acceleration schemes on finite sum optimization problems. First, we show that, perhaps surprisingly, the finite sum structure by itself, is not…
We propose ZeroSARAH -- a novel variant of the variance-reduced method SARAH (Nguyen et al., 2017) -- for minimizing the average of a large number of nonconvex functions $\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^{n}f_i(x)$. To the best of our knowledge, in…
Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly RL from verifiable reward (RLVR), has become a crucial phase of training large language models (LLMs) and a key focus of current scaling efforts. However, optimization practices in RL largely follow…
Training deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents necessitates overcoming the highly unstable nonconvex stochastic optimization inherent in the trial-and-error mechanism. To tackle this challenge, we propose a physics-inspired optimization…
We study the convergence of the shuffling gradient method, a popular algorithm employed to minimize the finite-sum function with regularization, in which functions are passed to apply (Proximal) Gradient Descent (GD) one by one whose order…