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Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular tool in training large-scale machine learning models. Its performance, however, is highly variable, depending crucially on the choice of the step sizes. Accordingly, a variety of strategies for…
Stochastic gradient optimization methods are broadly used to minimize non-convex smooth objective functions, for instance when training deep neural networks. However, theoretical guarantees on the asymptotic behaviour of these methods…
The asymptotic analysis of a generic stochastic optimization algorithm mainly relies on the establishment of a specific descent condition. While the convexity assumption allows for technical shortcuts and generally leads to strict…
For solving pseudo-convex global optimization problems, we present a novel fully adaptive steepest descent method (or ASDM) without any hard-to-estimate parameters. For the step-size regulation in an $\varepsilon$-normalized direction, we…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…
Stochastic gradient methods enable learning probabilistic models from large amounts of data. While large step-sizes (learning rates) have shown to be best for least-squares (e.g., Gaussian noise) once combined with parameter averaging,…
This paper proposes a thorough theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with non-increasing step sizes. First, we show that the recursion defining SGD can be provably approximated by solutions of a time inhomogeneous…
We consider the least-squares regression problem and provide a detailed asymptotic analysis of the performance of averaged constant-step-size stochastic gradient descent (a.k.a. least-mean-squares). In the strongly-convex case, we provide…
We study gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize for $\ell_2$-regularized logistic regression with linearly separable data. Classical theory suggests small stepsizes to ensure monotonic reduction of the optimization objective,…
Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large scale optimization of machine learning objective functions. Yet, its performance is greatly variable and heavily depends on the choice of the stepsizes. This has motivated a…
Motivated by machine learning problems over large data sets and distributed optimization over networks, we develop and analyze a new method called incremental Newton method for minimizing the sum of a large number of strongly convex…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
We present an adaptive step-size method, which does not include line-search techniques, for solving a wide class of nonconvex multiobjective programming problems on an unbounded constraint set. We also prove convergence of a general…
For solving a broad class of nonconvex programming problems on an unbounded constraint set, we provide a self-adaptive step-size strategy that does not include line-search techniques and establishes the convergence of a generic approach…
We provide a new understanding of the stochastic gradient bandit algorithm by showing that it converges to a globally optimal policy almost surely using \emph{any} constant learning rate. This result demonstrates that the stochastic…
Using gradient descent (GD) with fixed or decaying step-size is a standard practice in unconstrained optimization problems. However, when the loss function is only locally convex, such a step-size schedule artificially slows GD down as it…
In this work, we provide a fundamental unified convergence theorem used for deriving expected and almost sure convergence results for a series of stochastic optimization methods. Our unified theorem only requires to verify several…
Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…
In this paper, we study large-scale convex optimization algorithms based on the Newton method applied to regularized generalized self-concordant losses, which include logistic regression and softmax regression. We first prove that our new…
Classical theory for quasi-Newton schemes has focused on smooth deterministic unconstrained optimization while recent forays into stochastic convex optimization have largely resided in smooth, unconstrained, and strongly convex regimes.…