Related papers: Second-order Information Promotes Mini-Batch Robus…
We study the performance of Stochastic Cubic Regularized Newton (SCRN) on a class of functions satisfying gradient dominance property with $1\le\alpha\le2$ which holds in a wide range of applications in machine learning and signal…
In this paper we present a novel quasi-Newton algorithm for use in stochastic optimisation. Quasi-Newton methods have had an enormous impact on deterministic optimisation problems because they afford rapid convergence and computationally…
Policy gradient (PG) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its scalability and good performance. In recent years, several variance-reduced PG methods have been proposed with a theoretical guarantee of converging to an approximate…
In this paper, we consider to improve the stochastic variance reduce gradient (SVRG) method via incorporating the curvature information of the objective function. We propose to reduce the variance of stochastic gradients using the…
Gradient descent is the primary workhorse for optimizing large-scale problems in machine learning. However, its performance is highly sensitive to the choice of the learning rate. A key limitation of gradient descent is its lack of natural…
In this work we derive a second-order approach to bilevel optimization, a type of mathematical programming in which the solution to a parameterized optimization problem (the "lower" problem) is itself to be optimized (in the "upper"…
We present a new accelerated stochastic second-order method that is robust to both gradient and Hessian inexactness, which occurs typically in machine learning. We establish theoretical lower bounds and prove that our algorithm achieves…
Stochastic second-order methods achieve fast local convergence in strongly convex optimization by using noisy Hessian estimates to precondition the gradient. However, these methods typically reach superlinear convergence only when the…
We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…
Stochastic heavy ball momentum (SHB) is commonly used to train machine learning models, and often provides empirical improvements over stochastic gradient descent. By primarily focusing on strongly-convex quadratics, we aim to better…
Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in…
We propose a second-order (Hessian or Hessian-free) based optimization method for variational inference inspired by Gaussian backpropagation, and argue that quasi-Newton optimization can be developed as well. This is accomplished by…
While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…
Optimization plays a key role in machine learning. Recently, stochastic second-order methods have attracted much attention due to their low computational cost in each iteration. However, these algorithms might perform poorly especially if…
Many data-fitting applications require the solution of an optimization problem involving a sum of large number of functions of high dimensional parameter. Here, we consider the problem of minimizing a sum of $n$ functions over a convex…
Training deep neural networks (DNNs) used in modern machine learning is computationally expensive. Machine learning scientists, therefore, rely on stochastic first-order methods for training, coupled with significant hand-tuning, to obtain…
We present a second order algorithm, based on orthantwise directions, for solving optimization problems involving the sparsity enhancing $\ell_1$-norm. The main idea of our method consists in modifying the descent orthantwise directions by…
Second-order methods are provably faster than first-order methods, and their efficient implementations for large-scale optimization problems have attracted significant attention. Yet, optimization problems in ML often have nonsmooth…
We present an algorithm for minimizing a sum of functions that combines the computational efficiency of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with the second order curvature information leveraged by quasi-Newton methods. We unify these…
Pruning remains an effective strategy for reducing both the costs and environmental impact associated with deploying large neural networks (NNs) while maintaining performance. Classical methods, such as OBD (LeCun et al., 1989) and OBS…