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We propose a stochastic variant of the classical Polyak step-size (Polyak, 1987) commonly used in the subgradient method. Although computing the Polyak step-size requires knowledge of the optimal function values, this information is readily…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-23 Nicolas Loizou , Sharan Vaswani , Issam Laradji , Simon Lacoste-Julien

We propose and study Sparse Polyak, a variant of Polyak's adaptive step size, designed to solve high-dimensional statistical estimation problems where the problem dimension is allowed to grow much faster than the sample size. In such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-16 Tianqi Qiao , Marie Maros

Recently, the stochastic Polyak step size (SPS) has emerged as a competitive adaptive step size scheme for stochastic gradient descent. Here we develop ProxSPS, a proximal variant of SPS that can handle regularization terms. Developing a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-05 Fabian Schaipp , Robert M. Gower , Michael Ulbrich

We propose and analyze a variant of Sparse Polyak for high dimensional M-estimation problems. Sparse Polyak proposes a novel adaptive step-size rule tailored to suitably estimate the problem's curvature in the high-dimensional setting,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-25 Tianqi Qiao , Marie Maros

Gradient descent and its variants are de facto standard algorithms for training machine learning models. As gradient descent is sensitive to its hyperparameters, we need to tune the hyperparameters carefully using a grid search. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Yuki Takezawa , Han Bao , Ryoma Sato , Kenta Niwa , Makoto Yamada

The Polyak stepsize has been proven to be a fundamental stepsize in convex optimization, giving near optimal gradient descent rates across a wide range of assumptions. The universality of the Polyak stepsize has also inspired many…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-22 Francesco Orabona , Ryan D'Orazio

In this work, we study online convex optimization with a fixed constraint function $g : \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$. Prior work on this problem has shown $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret and cumulative constraint satisfaction $\sum_{t=1}^{T}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Spencer Hutchinson , Mahnoosh Alizadeh

In this paper, we suggest a new framework for analyzing primal subgradient methods for nonsmooth convex optimization problems. We show that the classical step-size rules, based on normalization of subgradient, or on the knowledge of optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-27 Yurii Nesterov

In this paper, we consider gradient methods for minimizing smooth convex functions, which employ the information obtained at the previous iterations in order to accelerate the convergence towards the optimal solution. This information is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-02 Yurii Nesterov , Mihai I. Florea

We propose a new subgradient method for the minimization of nonsmooth convex functions over a convex set. To speed up computations we use adaptive approximate projections only requiring to move within a certain distance of the exact…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-03-19 Dirk A. Lorenz , Marc E. Pfetsch , Andreas M. Tillmann

Submodular function minimization is a fundamental optimization problem that arises in several applications in machine learning and computer vision. The problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time, but general purpose algorithms have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-10 Alina Ene , Huy L. Nguyen

Policy gradient is a widely utilized and foundational algorithm in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). Renowned for its convergence guarantees and stability compared to other RL algorithms, its practical application is often hindered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Yunxiang Li , Rui Yuan , Chen Fan , Mark Schmidt , Samuel Horváth , Robert M. Gower , Martin Takáč

Stochastic projection algorithms for solving convex feasibility problems (CFPs) have attracted considerable attention due to their broad applicability. In this paper, we propose a unified stochastic bilevel reformulation for possibly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-01 Lu Zhang , Hongzhen Chen , Hongxia Wang , Hui Zhang

This paper is devoted to the class of paraconvex functions and presents some of its fundamental properties, characterization, and examples that can be used for their recognition and optimization. Next, the convergence analysis of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-06 Morteza Rahimi , Susan Ghaderi , Yves Moreau , Masoud Ahookhosh

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) methods have become fundamental optimization tools in machine learning, combining the computational efficiency of stochastic gradients with the acceleration benefits of momentum. Despite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-02 Zimeng Wang , Alp Yurtsever

Recently, Loizou et al. (2021), proposed and analyzed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic Polyak stepsize (SPS). The proposed SPS comes with strong convergence guarantees and competitive performance; however, it has two main…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-20 Antonio Orvieto , Simon Lacoste-Julien , Nicolas Loizou

In this paper we introduce two novel generalizations of the theory for gradient descent type methods in the proximal setting. First, we introduce the proportion function, which we further use to analyze all known (and many new)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-09-12 Dominik Csiba , Peter Richtárik

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum, also known as Stochastic Heavy Ball method (SHB), is one of the most popular algorithms for solving large-scale stochastic optimization problems in various machine learning tasks. In practical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-05 Dimitris Oikonomou , Nicolas Loizou

Gradient descent is slow to converge for ill-conditioned problems and non-convex problems. An important technique for acceleration is step-size adaptation. The first part of this paper contains a detailed review of step-size adaptation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Hengshuai Yao

The stochastic Polyak step size (SPS) has proven to be a promising choice for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), delivering competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art methods on smooth convex and non-convex optimization problems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-22 Dimitris Oikonomou , Nicolas Loizou