Related papers: Investigating Variance Definitions for Mirror Desc…
This paper addresses the problem of approximating an unknown probability distribution with density $f$ -- which can only be evaluated up to an unknown scaling factor -- with the help of a sequential algorithm that produces at each iteration…
Steepest descent is central in variational mathematics. We present a new transparent existence proof for curves of near-maximal slope --- an influential notion of steepest descent in a nonsmooth setting. We moreover show that for…
We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with gradient clipping on convex functions under a generalized smoothness assumption called $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness. Using gradient clipping, we establish a high probability convergence rate that…
In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…
The non-asymptotic analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) typically yields bounds that decompose into a bias term and a variance term. In this work, we focus on the bias component and study the extent to which SGD can match the…
Stein discrepancies (SDs) monitor convergence and non-convergence in approximate inference when exact integration and sampling are intractable. However, the computation of a Stein discrepancy can be prohibitive if the Stein operator - often…
We consider a recursive algorithm to construct an aggregated estimator from a finite number of base decision rules in the classification problem. The estimator approximately minimizes a convex risk functional under the l1-constraint. It is…
In this note, we establish a descent lemma for the population limit Mirrored Stein Variational Gradient Method~(MSVGD). This descent lemma does not rely on the path information of MSVGD but rather on a simple assumption for the mirrored…
Sign-based optimization methods have become popular in machine learning due to their favorable communication cost in distributed optimization and their surprisingly good performance in neural network training. Furthermore, they are closely…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used algorithm in deep-learning neural networks has attracted continuing studies for the theoretical principles behind its success. A recent work reports an anomaly (inverse) relation between the…
We study the problem of minimizing a relatively-smooth convex function using stochastic Bregman gradient methods. We first prove the convergence of Bregman Stochastic Gradient Descent (BSGD) to a region that depends on the noise (magnitude…
Convergence detection of iterative stochastic optimization methods is of great practical interest. This paper considers stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate and momentum. We show that there exists a transient…
Distributed gradient descent algorithms have come to the fore in modern machine learning, especially in parallelizing the handling of large datasets that are distributed across several workers. However, scant attention has been paid to…
SGD with momentum (SGDM) has been widely applied in many machine learning tasks, and it is often applied with dynamic stepsizes and momentum weights tuned in a stagewise manner. Despite of its empirical advantage over SGD, the role of…
Randomized coordinate descent (RCD) is a popular optimization algorithm with wide applications in solving various machine learning problems, which motivates a lot of theoretical analysis on its convergence behavior. As a comparison, there…
We study the problem of differentially-private (DP) stochastic (convex-concave) saddle-points in the $\ell_1$ setting. We propose $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-DP algorithms based on stochastic mirror descent that attain nearly…
This paper presents a comprehensive convergence analysis for the mirror descent (MD) method, a widely used algorithm in convex optimization. The key feature of this algorithm is that it provides a generalization of classical gradient-based…
Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…
The fluctuation effect of gradient expectation and variance caused by parameter update between consecutive iterations is neglected or confusing by current mainstream gradient optimization algorithms.Using this fluctuation effect, combined…