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We perform the first tight convergence analysis of the gradient method with varying step sizes when applied to smooth hypoconvex (weakly convex) functions. Hypoconvex functions are smooth nonconvex functions whose curvature is bounded and…
In the recent years, various gradient descent algorithms including the methods of gradient descent, gradient descent with momentum, adaptive gradient (AdaGrad), root-mean-square propagation (RMSProp) and adaptive moment estimation (Adam)…
In a recent series of papers it has been established that variants of Gradient Descent/Ascent and Mirror Descent exhibit last iterate convergence in convex-concave zero-sum games. Specifically, \cite{DISZ17, LiangS18} show last iterate…
In this paper we present a convergence rate analysis of inexact variants of several randomized iterative methods. Among the methods studied are: stochastic gradient descent, stochastic Newton, stochastic proximal point and stochastic…
The subgradient method is one of the most fundamental algorithmic schemes for nonsmooth optimization. The existing complexity and convergence results for this method are mainly derived for Lipschitz continuous objective functions. In this…
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…
Despite the empirical success of meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL), there are still a number poorly-understood discrepancies between theory and practice. Critically, biased gradient estimates are almost always implemented in practice,…
The recently introduced Gradient Methods with Memory use a subset of the past oracle information to create an accurate model of the objective function that enables them to surpass the Gradient Method in practical performance. The model…
Random Reshuffling (RR), which is a variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) employing sampling without replacement, is an immensely popular method for training supervised machine learning models via empirical risk minimization. Due to…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
We analyze the convergence rate of the monotone accelerated proximal gradient method, which can be used to solve structured convex composite optimization problems. A linear convergence rate is established when the smooth part of the…
Modern large-scale statistical models require to estimate thousands to millions of parameters. This is often accomplished by iterative algorithms such as gradient descent, projected gradient descent or their accelerated versions. What are…
Policy gradient methods have been frequently applied to problems in control and reinforcement learning with great success, yet existing convergence analysis still relies on non-intuitive, impractical and often opaque conditions. In…
This work establishes new convergence guarantees for gradient descent in smooth convex optimization via a computer-assisted analysis technique. Our theory allows nonconstant stepsize policies with frequent long steps potentially violating…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is among the simplest and most popular methods in optimization. The convergence rate for SGD has been extensively studied and tight analyses have been established for the running average scheme, but the…
We consider the stochastic gradient method with random reshuffling ($\mathsf{RR}$) for tackling smooth nonconvex optimization problems. $\mathsf{RR}$ finds broad applications in practice, notably in training neural networks. In this work,…
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…
Q-learning is known as one of the fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Its convergence has been the focus of extensive research over the past several decades. Recently, a new finitetime error bound and analysis for Q-learning…
We study population convergence guarantees of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for smooth convex objectives in the interpolation regime, where the noise at optimum is zero or near zero. The behavior of the last iterate of SGD in this…
We propose the stochastic average gradient (SAG) method for optimizing the sum of a finite number of smooth convex functions. Like stochastic gradient (SG) methods, the SAG method's iteration cost is independent of the number of terms in…