Related papers: An Adaptive Stochastic Gradient Method with Non-ne…
Stochastic gradient methods for minimizing nonconvex composite objective functions typically rely on the Lipschitz smoothness of the differentiable part, but this assumption fails in many important problem classes like quadratic inverse…
This paper presents an algorithmic framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems using only stochastic function evaluations. We employ central finite-difference based gradient estimation methods to approximate the…
This paper proposes a novel approach to adaptive step sizes in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by utilizing quantities that we have identified as numerically traceable -- the Lipschitz constant for gradients and a concept of the local…
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…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
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.…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
Establishing a fast rate of convergence for optimization methods is crucial to their applicability in practice. With the increasing popularity of deep learning over the past decade, stochastic gradient descent and its adaptive variants…
We propose an adaptive accelerated gradient method for solving smooth convex optimization problems. The method incorporates a scheme to determine the step size adaptively, by means of a local estimation of the smoothness constant, which is…
Shuffling-type gradient methods are favored in practice for their simplicity and rapid empirical performance. Despite extensive development of convergence guarantees under various assumptions in recent years, most require the Lipschitz…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has played a central role in machine learning. However, it requires a carefully hand-picked stepsize for fast convergence, which is notoriously tedious and time-consuming to tune. Over the last several…
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…
The purpose of this manuscript is to derive new convergence results for several subgradient methods applied to minimizing nonsmooth convex functions with H\"olderian growth. The growth condition is satisfied in many applications and…
We consider the problem of minimizing the composition of a smooth (nonconvex) function and a smooth vector mapping, where the inner mapping is in the form of an expectation over some random variable or a finite sum. We propose a stochastic…
We consider the minimization of an objective function given access to unbiased estimates of its gradient through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with constant step-size. While the detailed analysis was only performed for quadratic…
We introduce a notion of inexact model of a convex objective function, which allows for errors both in the function and in its gradient. For this situation, a gradient method with an adaptive adjustment of some parameters of the model is…
We present adaptive gradient methods (both basic and accelerated) for solving convex composite optimization problems in which the main part is approximately smooth (a.k.a. $(\delta, L)$-smooth) and can be accessed only via a (potentially…
We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…
In this paper we study the problem of minimizing the average of a large number ($n$) of smooth convex loss functions. We propose a new method, S2GD (Semi-Stochastic Gradient Descent), which runs for one or several epochs in each of which a…
The subgradient method is one of the most fundamental algorithmic schemes for nonsmooth optimization. The existing complexity and convergence results for this method are mainly derived for Lipschitz continuous objective functions. In this…