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The convergence behavior of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is highly sensitive to the batch size and learning rate settings. Recent theoretical studies have identified the existence of a critical batch size that minimizes…
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…
Selecting an effective step-size is a fundamental challenge in first-order optimization, especially for problems with non-Euclidean geometries. This paper presents a novel adaptive step-size strategy for optimization algorithms that rely on…
Several classical adaptive optimization algorithms, such as line search and trust region methods, have been recently extended to stochastic settings where function values, gradients, and Hessians in some cases, are estimated via stochastic…
Adaptive gradient methods such as RMSProp and Adam use exponential moving estimate of the squared gradient to compute adaptive step sizes, achieving better convergence than SGD in face of noisy objectives. However, Adam can have undesirable…
Gradient-based methods are well-suited for derivative-free optimization (DFO), where finite-difference (FD) estimates are commonly used as gradient surrogates. Traditional stochastic approximation methods, such as Kiefer-Wolfowitz (KW) and…
This work introduces a two-step stepsize schedule for stochastic gradient methods minimizing smooth strongly convex functions. We consider the setting where only stochastic gradient approximations, which are unbiased, of bounded variance,…
This paper develops a new dimension-free Azuma-Hoeffding type bound on summation norm of a martingale difference sequence with random individual bounds. With this novel result, we provide high-probability bounds for the gradient norm…
We present and analyze several strategies for improving the performance of stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods. We first show that the convergence rate of these methods can be preserved under a decreasing sequence of errors…
Adaptive stochastic gradient methods such as AdaGrad have gained popularity in particular for training deep neural networks. The most commonly used and studied variant maintains a diagonal matrix approximation to second order information by…
Stochastic-gradient sampling methods are often used to perform Bayesian inference on neural networks. It has been observed that the methods in which notions of differential geometry are included tend to have better performances, with the…
The goal of this paper is to accelerate the training of machine learning models, a critical challenge since the training of large-scale deep neural models can be computationally expensive. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants…
Restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) are a powerful class of generative models, but their training requires computing a gradient that, unlike supervised backpropagation on typical loss functions, is notoriously difficult even to…
We propose a statistical adaptive procedure called SALSA for automatically scheduling the learning rate (step size) in stochastic gradient methods. SALSA first uses a smoothed stochastic line-search procedure to gradually increase the…
Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…
Randomized iterative methods have gained recent interest in machine learning and signal processing for solving large-scale linear systems. One such example is the randomized Douglas-Rachford (RDR) method, which updates the iterate by…
Recent studies show that the two-dimensional quadratic termination property has great potential in improving performance of the gradient method. However, it is not clear whether higher-dimensional quadratic termination leads further…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…
We propose a new gradient projection algorithm that compares favorably with the fastest algorithms available to date for $\ell_1$-constrained sparse recovery from noisy data, both in the compressed sensing and inverse problem frameworks.…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…