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This paper considers simulation-based optimization of the performance of a regime-switching stochastic system over a finite set of feasible configurations. Inspired by the stochastic fictitious play learning rules in game theory, we propose…
In recent studies, line search methods have shown significant improvements in the performance of traditional stochastic gradient descent techniques, eliminating the need for a specific learning rate schedule. In this paper, we identify…
We present a novel, fast (exponential rate adaption), ab initio (hyper-parameter-free) gradient based optimizer algorithm. The main idea of the method is to adapt the learning rate $\alpha$ by situational awareness, mainly striving for…
Stochastic gradient decent~(SGD) and its variants, including some accelerated variants, have become popular for training in machine learning. However, in all existing SGD and its variants, the sample size in each iteration~(epoch) of…
We propose a novel stochastic gradient descent method for solving linear least squares problems with partially observed data. Our method uses submatrices indexed by a randomly selected pair of row and column index sets to update the iterate…
In neural networks with binary activations and or binary weights the training by gradient descent is complicated as the model has piecewise constant response. We consider stochastic binary networks, obtained by adding noises in front of…
We introduce a novel dynamic learning-rate scheduling scheme grounded in theory with the goal of simplifying the manual and time-consuming tuning of schedules in practice. Our approach is based on estimating the locally-optimal stepsize,…
This paper describes stochastic search approaches, including a new stochastic algorithm and an adaptive mutation operator, for learning Bayesian networks from incomplete data. This problem is characterized by a huge solution space with a…
We propose an online learning algorithm for a class of machine learning models under a separable stochastic approximation framework. The essence of our idea lies in the observation that certain parameters in the models are easier to…
Learning rules -- prescriptions for updating model parameters to improve performance -- are typically assumed rather than derived. Why do some learning rules work better than others, and under what assumptions can a given rule be considered…
Learning to optimize - the idea that we can learn from data algorithms that optimize a numerical criterion - has recently been at the heart of a growing number of research efforts. One of the most challenging issues within this approach is…
It has been shown that gradient descent can yield the zero training loss in the over-parametrized regime (the width of the neural networks is much larger than the number of data points). In this work, combining the ideas of some existing…
We take a Bayesian perspective to illustrate a connection between training speed and the marginal likelihood in linear models. This provides two major insights: first, that a measure of a model's training speed can be used to estimate its…
We propose statistically robust and computationally efficient linear learning methods in the high-dimensional batch setting, where the number of features $d$ may exceed the sample size $n$. We employ, in a generic learning setting, two…
We consider derivative-free algorithms for stochastic and non-stochastic convex optimization problems that use only function values rather than gradients. Focusing on non-asymptotic bounds on convergence rates, we show that if pairs of…
Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent and variants thereof have become standard for large-scale empirical risk minimization like the training of neural networks. These methods are usually used with a constant batch size chosen by simple…
Backtracking line search is foundational in numerical optimization. The basic idea is to adjust the step-size of an algorithm by a constant factor until some chosen criterion (e.g. Armijo, Descent Lemma) is satisfied. We propose a novel way…
In this paper, we incorporate the Barzilai-Borwein step size into gradient descent methods used to train deep networks. This allows us to adapt the learning rate using a two-point approximation to the secant equation which quasi-Newton…
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…
The popularity of bi-level optimization (BO) in deep learning has spurred a growing interest in studying gradient-based BO algorithms. However, existing algorithms involve two coupled learning rates that can be affected by approximation…