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We study stochastic gradient descent for solving conditional stochastic optimization problems, in which an objective to be minimized is given by a parametric nested expectation with an outer expectation taken with respect to one random…
In this paper, we consider a non-convex loss-minimization problem of learning Supervised PageRank models, which can account for some properties not considered by classical approaches such as the classical PageRank model. We propose…
Variational Optimization forms a differentiable upper bound on an objective. We show that approaches such as Natural Evolution Strategies and Gaussian Perturbation, are special cases of Variational Optimization in which the expectations are…
We give a simple local Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) criterion that guarantees linear (exponential) convergence of gradient flow and gradient descent to a zero-loss solution of a nonnegative objective. We then verify this criterion for the…
In this paper, we consider continuous-time stochastic optimal control problems where the cost is evaluated through a coherent risk measure. We provide an explicit gradient descent-ascent algorithm which applies to problems subject to…
In nonsmooth optimization, a negative subgradient is not necessarily a descent direction, making the design of convergent descent methods based on zeroth-order and first-order information a challenging task. The well-studied bundle methods…
We develop a new primitive for stochastic optimization: a low-bias, low-cost estimator of the minimizer $x_\star$ of any Lipschitz strongly-convex function. In particular, we use a multilevel Monte-Carlo approach due to Blanchet and Glynn…
In this paper we propose a distributed version of a randomized block-coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of a partially separable smooth convex function and a fully separable non-smooth convex function. Under the assumption of…
Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to…
The stochastic Frank-Wolfe method has recently attracted much general interest in the context of optimization for statistical and machine learning due to its ability to work with a more general feasible region. However, there has been a…
We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…
In this paper we model the loss function of high-dimensional optimization problems by a Gaussian random field, or equivalently a Gaussian process. Our aim is to study gradient descent in such loss functions or energy landscapes and compare…
The study of optimal control problems under uncertainty plays an important role in scientific numerical simulations. This class of optimization problems is strongly utilized in engineering, biology and finance. In this paper, a stochastic…
Many machine learning models require a training procedure based on running stochastic gradient descent. A key element for the efficiency of those algorithms is the choice of the learning rate schedule. While finding good learning rates…
Optimization problems with continuous data appear in, e.g., robust machine learning, functional data analysis, and variational inference. Here, the target function is given as an integral over a family of (continuously) indexed target…
This book is devoted to finite-dimensional problems of non-convex non-smooth optimization and numerical methods for their solution. The problem of nonconvexity is studied in the book on two main models of nonconvex dependencies: these are…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a prevalent optimization technique for large-scale distributed machine learning. While SGD computation can be efficiently divided between multiple machines, communication typically becomes a bottleneck…
Using gradient descent (GD) with fixed or decaying step-size is a standard practice in unconstrained optimization problems. However, when the loss function is only locally convex, such a step-size schedule artificially slows GD down as it…
Stochastic gradient descent is a classic algorithm that has gained great popularity especially in the last decades as the most common approach for training models in machine learning. While the algorithm has been well-studied when…
Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…