Related papers: Almost sure convergence rates of stochastic gradie…
Deep learning methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in many application scenarios. Yet, these methods require a significant amount of hyperparameters tuning in order to achieve the best results. In particular, tuning the learning…
We establish the O($\frac{1}{k}$) convergence rate for distributed stochastic gradient methods that operate over strongly convex costs and random networks. The considered class of methods is standard each node performs a weighted average 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…
We propose a stochastic gradient framework for solving stochastic composite convex optimization problems with (possibly) infinite number of linear inclusion constraints that need to be satisfied almost surely. We use smoothing and homotopy…
In this paper, we establish new convergence results for the quantized distributed gradient descent and suggest a novel strategy of choosing the stepsizes for the high-performance of the algorithm. Under the strongly convexity assumption on…
Motivated by broad applications in machine learning, we study the popular accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) algorithm for solving (possibly nonconvex) optimization problems. We characterize the finite-time performance of this…
Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic…
With a weighting scheme proportional to t, a traditional stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm achieves a high probability convergence rate of O({\kappa}/T) for strongly convex functions, instead of O({\kappa} ln(T)/T). We also prove…
Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their action selections so as to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms require solving a nonconvex and…
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,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…
Gradient descent (GD) methods for the training of artificial neural networks (ANNs) belong nowadays to the most heavily employed computational schemes in the digital world. Despite the compelling success of such methods, it remains an open…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
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…
When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…
We provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of gradient clipping in training deep neural networks. The key ingredient is a new smoothness condition derived from practical neural network training examples. We observe that…
Gradient dominance property is a condition weaker than strong convexity, yet sufficiently ensures global convergence even in non-convex optimization. This property finds wide applications in machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL),…