Related papers: Composing Optimized Stepsize Schedules for Gradien…

Optimizers like Adam and AdaGrad have been very successful in training large-scale neural networks. Yet, the performance of these methods is heavily dependent on a carefully tuned learning rate schedule. We show that in many large-scale…

Much recent attention has been devoted to gradient descent algorithms where the steepest descent step size is replaced by a similar one from a previous iteration or gets updated only once every second step, thus forming a {\em faster…

Submodular function minimization is a fundamental optimization problem that arises in several applications in machine learning and computer vision. The problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time, but general purpose algorithms have…

We study the worst-case convergence rates of the proximal gradient method for minimizing the sum of a smooth strongly convex function and a non-smooth convex function whose proximal operator is available. We establish the exact worst-case…

We consider the projected gradient algorithm for the nonconvex best subset selection problem that minimizes a given empirical loss function under an $\ell_0$-norm constraint. Through decomposing the feasible set of the given sparsity…

We explore an explicit link between stochastic gradient descent using common batching strategies and splitting methods for ordinary differential equations. From this perspective, we introduce a new minibatching strategy (called Symmetric…

We derive several numerical methods for designing optimized first-order algorithms in unconstrained convex optimization settings. Our methods are based on the Performance Estimation Problem (PEP) framework, which casts the worst-case…

Bilevel optimization is a central tool in machine learning for high-dimensional hyperparameter tuning. Its applications are vast; for instance, in imaging it can be used for learning data-adaptive regularizers and optimizing forward…

We study the problem of minimizing a strongly convex, smooth function when we have noisy estimates of its gradient. We propose a novel multistage accelerated algorithm that is universally optimal in the sense that it achieves the optimal…

We propose a new method for unconstrained optimization of a smooth and strongly convex function, which attains the optimal rate of convergence of Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent. The new algorithm has a simple geometric…

We suggest a simple adaptive step-size procedure, which does not require any line-search, for a general class of nonlinear optimization methods and prove convergence of a general method under mild assumptions. In particular, the goal…

We study convergence rates of the classic proximal bundle method for a variety of nonsmooth convex optimization problems. We show that, without any modification, this algorithm adapts to converge faster in the presence of smoothness or a…

This paper considers stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method for solving constrained convex minimization problems. In particular, a stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method with weighted iterate-averaging is investigated and its…

We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…

An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…

In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…

Preconditioned gradient iterations for very large eigenvalue problems are efficient solvers with growing popularity. However, only for the simplest preconditioned eigensolver, namely the preconditioned gradient iteration (or preconditioned…

The Polyak stepsize for Gradient Descent is known for its fast convergence but requires prior knowledge of the optimal functional value, which is often unavailable in practice. In this paper, we propose a parameter-free approach that…

We study a fixed step-size noisy distributed gradient descent algorithm for solving optimization problems in which the objective is a finite sum of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Random perturbations are introduced to the…

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…