Related papers: General framework for online-to-nonconvex conversi…
Existing learning rate schedules that do not require specification of the optimization stopping step T are greatly out-performed by learning rate schedules that depend on T. We propose an approach that avoids the need for this stopping time…
Neural networks are trained by optimizing multi-dimensional sets of fitting parameters on non-convex loss landscapes. Low-loss regions of the landscapes correspond to the parameter sets that perform well on the training data. A key issue in…
Modern statistical applications often involve minimizing an objective function that may be nonsmooth and/or nonconvex. This paper focuses on a broad Bregman-surrogate algorithm framework including the local linear approximation, mirror…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an out-of-equilibrium algorithm used extensively to train artificial neural networks. However very little is known on to what extent SGD is crucial for to the success of this technology and, in…
In this paper, we investigate the framework of Online Convex Optimization (OCO) for online learning. OCO offers a very powerful online learning framework for many applications. In this context, we study a specific framework of OCO called…
We study distributed stochastic nonconvex optimization in multi-agent networks. We introduce a novel algorithmic framework for the distributed minimization of the sum of the expected value of a smooth (possibly nonconvex) function (the…
Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…
We propose an online learning algorithm for a class of machine learning models under a separable stochastic approximation framework. The essence of our idea lies in the observation that certain parameters in the models are easier to…
Uniform stability is a notion of algorithmic stability that bounds the worst case change in the model output by the algorithm when a single data point in the dataset is replaced. An influential work of Hardt et al. (2016) provides strong…
We study non-smooth stochastic decentralized optimization problems over time-varying networks, where objective functions are distributed across nodes and network connections may intermittently appear or break. Specifically, we consider two…
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…
Recent developments on large-scale distributed machine learning applications, e.g., deep neural networks, benefit enormously from the advances in distributed non-convex optimization techniques, e.g., distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent…
Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are the workhorses of large-scale machine learning. While classical theory focused on analyzing the performance of these methods in convex optimization problems, the most notable…
In this paper, we consider nonconvex minimax optimization, which is gaining prominence in many modern machine learning applications such as GANs. Large-scale edge-based collection of training data in these applications calls for…
Local SGD is a promising approach to overcome the communication overhead in distributed learning by reducing the synchronization frequency among worker nodes. Despite the recent theoretical advances of local SGD in empirical risk…
In this thesis, we propose new theoretical frameworks for the analysis of stochastic and distributed methods with error compensation and local updates. Using these frameworks, we develop more than 20 new optimization methods, including the…
Asynchronous distributed algorithms are a popular way to reduce synchronization costs in large-scale optimization, and in particular for neural network training. However, for nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives, few convergence guarantees…
We propose Multi-Level Local SGD, a distributed gradient method for learning a smooth, non-convex objective in a heterogeneous multi-level network. Our network model consists of a set of disjoint sub-networks, with a single hub and multiple…
One approach for reducing run time and improving efficiency of machine learning is to reduce the convergence rate of the optimization algorithm used. Shuffling is an algorithm technique that is widely used in machine learning, but it only…
In this thesis, I study the minimax oracle complexity of distributed stochastic optimization. First, I present the "graph oracle model", an extension of the classic oracle complexity framework that can be applied to study distributed…