Related papers: Taming Nonconvex Stochastic Mirror Descent with Ge…
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…
This paper proposes a thorough theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with non-increasing step sizes. First, we show that the recursion defining SGD can be provably approximated by solutions of a time inhomogeneous…
Learning-to-optimize is an emerging framework that seeks to speed up the solution of certain optimization problems by leveraging training data. Learned optimization solvers have been shown to outperform classical optimization algorithms in…
The mirror descent algorithm is known to be effective in situations where it is beneficial to adapt the mirror map to the underlying geometry of the optimization model. However, the effect of mirror maps on the geometry of distributed…
We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…
Uniform stability is a notion of algorithmic stability that bounds the worst case change in the model output by the algorithm when a single data point in the dataset is replaced. An influential work of Hardt et al. (2016) provides strong…
We revisit the classical problem of estimating an unknown distribution from its samples by fitting a mixture model that minimizes cross-entropy loss. Framing the task as a stochastic convex optimization problem over the space of $ M…
This paper explores a new framework for reinforcement learning based on online convex optimization, in particular mirror descent and related algorithms. Mirror descent can be viewed as an enhanced gradient method, particularly suited to…
We consider randomized block coordinate stochastic mirror descent (RBSMD) methods for solving high-dimensional stochastic optimization problems with strongly convex objective functions. Our goal is to develop RBSMD schemes that achieve a…
We propose an extension of a special form of gradient descent -- in the literature known as linearised Bregman iteration -- to a larger class of non-convex functions. We replace the classical (squared) two norm metric in the gradient…
In this paper, we focus on the decentralized stochastic subgradient-based methods in minimizing nonsmooth nonconvex functions without Clarke regularity, especially in the decentralized training of nonsmooth neural networks. We propose a…
The stochastic gradient descent method with momentum (SGDM) is a common approach for solving large-scale and stochastic optimization problems. Despite its popularity, the convergence behavior of SGDM remains less understood in nonconvex…
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…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
This paper studies the convergence of the mirror descent algorithm for finite horizon stochastic control problems with measure-valued control processes. The control objective involves a convex regularisation function, denoted as $h$, with…
Despite being highly over-parametrized, and having the ability to fully interpolate the training data, deep networks are known to generalize well to unseen data. It is now understood that part of the reason for this is that the training…
We study a stochastic optimization problem in which the sampling distribution depends on the decision variable, and the available samples are generated through an iterate-dependent Markov chain. Such settings arise naturally in problems…
Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has become the standard algorithm for training machine learning models with rigorous privacy guarantees. Despite its widespread use, the theoretical understanding of its long-run…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…