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A prevalent belief among optimization specialists is that linear convergence of gradient descent is contingent on the function growing quadratically away from its minimizers. In this work, we argue that this belief is inaccurate. We show…

In this paper, acceleration of gradient methods for convex optimization problems with weak levels of convexity and smoothness is considered. Starting from the universal fast gradient method which was designed to be an optimal method for…

In this paper, we study the convergence rate of the gradient (or steepest descent) method with fixed step lengths for finding a stationary point of an $L$-smooth function. We establish a new convergence rate, and show that the bound may be…

We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…

Stochastic gradient algorithms are often unstable when applied to functions that do not have Lipschitz-continuous and/or bounded gradients. Gradient clipping is a simple and effective technique to stabilize the training process for problems…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with mini-batching is a standard tool in large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical properties under heavy-tailed gradient noise remain largely unexplored. In this paper we study SGD with increasing…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular tool in training large-scale machine learning models. Its performance, however, is highly variable, depending crucially on the choice of the step sizes. Accordingly, a variety of strategies for…

Adaptive gradient methods have been widely adopted in training large-scale deep neural networks, especially large foundation models. Despite the huge success in practice, their theoretical advantages over classical gradient methods with…

We consider gradient descent with constant stepsizes and derive exact worst-case convergence rates on the minimum gradient norm of the iterates. Our analysis covers all possible stepsizes and arbitrary upper/lower bounds on the curvature of…

In this paper we propose a generalized condition for a sharp minimum, somewhat similar to the inexact oracle proposed recently by Devolder-Glineur-Nesterov. The proposed approach makes it possible to extend the class of applicability of…

Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…

It is well-known that the reparameterisation gradient estimator, which exhibits low variance in practice, is biased for non-differentiable models. This may compromise correctness of gradient-based optimisation methods such as stochastic…

We investigate the convergence rates and data sample sizes required for training a machine learning model using a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, where data points are sampled based on either their loss value or uncertainty…

We analyze the convergence of a nonlocal gradient descent method for minimizing a class of high-dimensional non-convex functions, where a directional Gaussian smoothing (DGS) is proposed to define the nonlocal gradient (also referred to as…

We develop a novel framework to study smooth and strongly convex optimization algorithms, both deterministic and stochastic. Focusing on quadratic functions we are able to examine optimization algorithms as a recursive application of linear…

We consider the optimization of a smooth and strongly convex objective using constant step-size stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and study its properties through the prism of Markov chains. We show that, for unbiased gradient estimates…

The incremental gradient method is a prominent algorithm for minimizing a finite sum of smooth convex functions, used in many contexts including large-scale data processing applications and distributed optimization over networks. It is a…

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…

Gradient Descent (GD) is a ubiquitous algorithm for finding the optimal solution to an optimization problem. For reduced computational complexity, the optimal solution $\mathrm{x^*}$ of the optimization problem must be attained in a minimum…