Related papers: Optimal Shrinkage for Distributed Second-Order Opt…

Incorporating a deep generative model as the prior distribution in inverse problems has established substantial success in reconstructing images from corrupted observations. Notwithstanding, the existing optimization approaches use gradient…

Random projections or sketching are widely used in many algorithmic and learning contexts. Here we study the performance of iterative Hessian sketch for least-squares problems. By leveraging and extending recent results from random matrix…

This paper studies stochastic minimization of a finite-sum loss $ F (\mathbf{x}) = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{\xi=1}^N f(\mathbf{x};\xi) $. In many real-world scenarios, the Hessian matrix of such objectives exhibits a low-rank structure on a batch…

Bilevel optimization has arisen as a powerful tool in modern machine learning. However, due to the nested structure of bilevel optimization, even gradient-based methods require second-order derivative approximations via Jacobian- or/and…

We propose a new globally convergent stochastic second order method. Our starting point is the development of a new Sketched Newton-Raphson (SNR) method for solving large scale nonlinear equations of the form $F(x)=0$ with $F:\mathbb{R}^p…

This paper is concerned with multi-agent optimization problem. A distributed randomized gradient-free mirror descent (DRGFMD) method is developed by introducing a randomized gradient-free oracle in the mirror descent scheme where the…

A class of second-order algorithms is proposed for minimizing smooth nonconvex functions that alternates between regularized Newton and negative curvature steps in an iteration-dependent subspace. In most cases, the Hessian matrix is…

We present a finite-time analysis of two smoothed functional stochastic approximation algorithms for simulation-based optimization. The first is a two time-scale gradient-based method, while the second is a three time-scale Newton-based…

We consider minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function using a stochastic Newton method. At each iteration, the algorithm is given an oracle access to a stochastic estimate of the Hessian matrix. The oracle model includes…

In this paper we consider convergence rate problems for stochastic strongly-convex optimization in the non-Euclidean sense with a constraint set over a time-varying multi-agent network. We propose two efficient non-Euclidean stochastic…

This work introduces the nested-set Hessian approximation, a second-order approximation method that can be used in any derivative-free optimization routine that requires such information. It is built on the foundation of the generalized…

We present a distributed (non-Bayesian) learning algorithm for the problem of parameter estimation with Gaussian noise. The algorithm is expressed as explicit updates on the parameters of the Gaussian beliefs (i.e. means and precision). We…

This paper focuses on investigating Stein's invariant shrinkage estimators for large sample covariance matrices and precision matrices in high-dimensional settings. We consider models that have nearly arbitrary population covariance…

We present a family of generalized Hessian estimators of the objective using random direction stochastic approximation (RDSA) by utilizing only noisy function measurements. The form of each estimator and the order of the bias depend on the…

Using quasi-Newton methods in stochastic optimization is not a trivial task given the difficulty of extracting curvature information from the noisy gradients. Moreover, pre-conditioning noisy gradient observations tend to amplify the noise.…

We consider variants of a recently-developed Newton-CG algorithm for nonconvex problems \citep{royer2018newton} in which inexact estimates of the gradient and the Hessian information are used for various steps. Under certain conditions on…

In this paper we derive the optimal linear shrinkage estimator for the high-dimensional mean vector using random matrix theory. The results are obtained under the assumption that both the dimension $p$ and the sample size $n$ tend to…

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

In this paper, we explore the two-point zeroth-order gradient estimator and identify the distribution of random perturbations that minimizes the estimator's asymptotic variance as the perturbation stepsize tends to zero. We formulate it as…

Second-order methods are provably faster than first-order methods, and their efficient implementations for large-scale optimization problems have attracted significant attention. Yet, optimization problems in ML often have nonsmooth…