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Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…
It is well-known that the reparameterisation gradient estimator, which exhibits low variance in practice, is biased for non-differentiable models. This may compromise correctness of gradient-based optimisation methods such as stochastic…
In a real Hilbert space setting, we study the convergence properties of an inexact gradient algorithm featuring both viscous and Hessian driven damping for convex differentiable optimization. In this algorithm, the gradient evaluation can…
In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…
In this paper, we present a generic framework that allows accelerating almost arbitrary non-accelerated deterministic and randomized algorithms for smooth convex optimization problems. The main approach of our envelope is the same as in…
Many recent applications in machine learning and data fitting call for the algorithmic solution of structured smooth convex optimization problems. Although the gradient descent method is a natural choice for this task, it requires exact…
We study the generalization error of randomized learning algorithms -- focusing on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) -- using a novel combination of PAC-Bayes and algorithmic stability. Importantly, our generalization bounds hold for all…
Nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems broadly emerge in machine learning and business decision making, whereas two core challenges impede the development of efficient solution methods with finite-time convergence guarantee: the lack of…
Adaptive gradient methods, such as AdaGrad, have become fundamental tools in deep learning. Despite their widespread use, the asymptotic convergence of AdaGrad remains poorly understood in non-convex scenarios. In this work, we present the…
Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…
Stochastic gradient algorithms have been the main focus of large-scale learning problems and they led to important successes in machine learning. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of learning rate and the amount of the…
We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter…
We study the iteration complexity of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for minimizing the gradient norm of smooth, possibly nonconvex functions. We provide several results, implying that the $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ upper bound of…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
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),…
In this paper, we provide a sub-gradient based algorithm to solve general constrained convex optimization without taking projections onto the domain set. The well studied Frank-Wolfe type algorithms also avoid projections. However, they are…
In this paper we investigate how gradient-based algorithms such as gradient descent, (multi-pass) stochastic gradient descent, its persistent variant, and the Langevin algorithm navigate non-convex loss-landscapes and which of them is able…
Gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent are central to modern machine learning, yet their behavior under large step sizes remains theoretically unclear. Recent work suggests that acceleration often arises near the edge of…
Adaptive gradient methods such as AdaGrad and its variants update the stepsize in stochastic gradient descent on the fly according to the gradients received along the way; such methods have gained widespread use in large-scale optimization…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…