Related papers: Gradient Descent Methods for Regularized Optimizat…

We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) plays a central role in modern machine learning. While there is extensive work on providing error upper bound for SGD, not much is known about SGD error lower bound. In this paper, we study the convergence…

Iteration complexities for optimizing smooth functions with first-order algorithms are typically stated in terms of a global Lipschitz constant of the gradient, and near-optimal results are then achieved using fixed step sizes. But many…

The training of machine learning models is typically carried out using some form of gradient descent, often with great success. However, non-asymptotic analyses of first-order optimization algorithms typically employ a gradient smoothness…

We study the classical optimization problem $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x)$ and analyze the gradient descent (GD) method in both nonconvex and convex settings. It is well-known that, under the $L$-smoothness assumption ($\|\nabla^2 f(x)\|…

This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…

Gradient descent is an important class of iterative algorithms for minimizing convex functions. Classically, gradient descent has been a sequential and synchronous process. Distributed and asynchronous variants of gradient descent have been…

This paper addresses the study of derivative-free smooth optimization problems, where the gradient information on the objective function is unavailable. Two novel general derivative-free methods are proposed and developed for minimizing…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a promising method for solving large-scale inverse problems, due to its excellent scalability with respect to data size. In this work, we analyze a new data-driven regularized stochastic gradient descent…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a widely deployed optimization procedure throughout data-driven and simulation-driven disciplines, which has drawn a substantial interest in understanding its global behavior across a broad class of…

We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…

Adjusting the learning rate schedule in stochastic gradient methods is an important unresolved problem which requires tuning in practice. If certain parameters of the loss function such as smoothness or strong convexity constants are known,…

Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…

Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…

We introduce a perturbed preconditioned gradient descent (PPGD) method for the unconstrained minimization of a strongly convex objective $G$ with a locally Lipschitz continuous gradient. We assume that $G(v)=E(v)+F(v)$ and that the gradient…

This work studies the generalization error of gradient methods. More specifically, we focus on how training steps $T$ and step-size $\eta$ might affect generalization in smooth stochastic convex optimization (SCO) problems. We first provide…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibits strong algorithmic regularization effects in practice, which has been hypothesized to play an important role in the generalization of modern machine learning approaches. In this work, we seek to…

Stochastic Gradient Decent (SGD) is one of the core techniques behind the success of deep neural networks. The gradient provides information on the direction in which a function has the steepest rate of change. The main problem with basic…

Multi-epoch, small-batch, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been the method of choice for learning with large over-parameterized models. A popular theory for explaining why SGD works well in practice is that the algorithm has an…

This work analyzes the convergence of a class of smoothing-based gradient descent methods when applied to optimization problems. In particular, Gaussian smoothing is employed to define a nonlocal gradient that reduces high-frequency noise,…