Related papers: Second-order Information Promotes Mini-Batch Robus…
Stochastic variance reduction has proven effective at accelerating first-order algorithms for solving convex finite-sum optimization tasks such as empirical risk minimization. Incorporating second-order information has proven helpful in…
Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…
We design an algorithm which finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point (with $\|\nabla F(x)\|\le \epsilon$) using $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector products, matching guarantees that were previously available…
Second-order optimization methods are among the most widely used optimization approaches for convex optimization problems, and have recently been used to optimize non-convex optimization problems such as deep learning models. The widely…
Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…
Second-order information -- such as curvature or data covariance -- is critical for optimisation, diagnostics, and robustness. However, in many modern settings, only the gradients are observable. We show that the gradients alone can reveal…
First order methods, which solely rely on gradient information, are commonly used in diverse machine learning (ML) and data analysis (DA) applications. This is attributed to the simplicity of their implementations, as well as low…
Variance-reduced gradient estimators for policy gradient methods have been one of the main focus of research in the reinforcement learning in recent years as they allow acceleration of the estimation process. We propose a variance-reduced…
In view of a direct and simple improvement of vanilla SGD, this paper presents a fine-tuning of its step-sizes in the mini-batch case. For doing so, one estimates curvature, based on a local quadratic model and using only noisy gradient…
Optimizing smooth convex functions in stochastic settings, where only noisy estimates of gradients and Hessians are available, is a fundamental problem in optimization. While first-order methods possess a low per-iteration cost, their…
We develop a new algorithm for non-convex stochastic optimization that finds an $\epsilon$-critical point in the optimal $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector product computations. Our algorithm uses Hessian-vector…
The Hessian-vector product has been utilized to find a second-order stationary solution with strong complexity guarantee (e.g., almost linear time complexity in the problem's dimensionality). In this paper, we propose to further reduce the…
We present two new remarkably simple stochastic second-order methods for minimizing the average of a very large number of sufficiently smooth and strongly convex functions. The first is a stochastic variant of Newton's method (SN), and the…
We present a novel statistical inference framework for convex empirical risk minimization, using approximate stochastic Newton steps. The proposed algorithm is based on the notion of finite differences and allows the approximation of a…
We propose a stochastic variance-reduced cubic regularized Newton method for non-convex optimization. At the core of our algorithm is a novel semi-stochastic gradient along with a semi-stochastic Hessian, which are specifically designed for…
In this paper, we investigate a second-order stochastic algorithm for solving large-scale binary classification problems. We propose to make use of a new hybrid stochastic Newton algorithm that includes two weighted components in the…
This paper studies stochastic minimization of a finite-sum loss $ F (\mathbf{x}) = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{\xi=1}^N f(\mathbf{x};\xi) $. In many real-world scenarios, the Hessian matrix of such objectives exhibits a low-rank structure on a batch…
In this paper, we study stochastic non-convex optimization with non-convex random functions. Recent studies on non-convex optimization revolve around establishing second-order convergence, i.e., converging to a nearly second-order optimal…
This paper proposes a framework of L-BFGS based on the (approximate) second-order information with stochastic batches, as a novel approach to the finite-sum minimization problems. Different from the classical L-BFGS where stochastic batches…
In this paper, we study a second-order approach to policy optimization in reinforcement learning. Existing second-order methods often suffer from suboptimal sample complexity or rely on unrealistic assumptions about importance sampling. To…