Related papers: Negative Stepsizes Make Gradient-Descent-Ascent Co…
A commonly used heuristic in non-convex optimization is Normalized Gradient Descent (NGD) - a variant of gradient descent in which only the direction of the gradient is taken into account and its magnitude ignored. We analyze this heuristic…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…
The goal of this paper is to debunk and dispel the magic behind black-box optimizers and stochastic optimizers. It aims to build a solid foundation on how and why the techniques work. This manuscript crystallizes this knowledge by deriving…
This paper considers the analysis of continuous time gradient-based optimization algorithms through the lens of nonlinear contraction theory. It demonstrates that in the case of a time-invariant objective, most elementary results on…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variations have been effectively used to optimize neural network models. However, with the rapid growth of big data and deep learning, SGD is no longer the most suitable choice due to its…
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 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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a workhorse algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems in data science and machine learning. Understanding the convergence of SGD is hence of fundamental importance. In this work we examine…
In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…
Subgradient methods are the natural extension to the non-smooth case of the classical gradient descent for regular convex optimization problems. However, in general, they are characterized by slow convergence rates, and they require…
Stochastic descent methods (of the gradient and mirror varieties) have become increasingly popular in optimization. In fact, it is now widely recognized that the success of deep learning is not only due to the special deep architecture of…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
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…
Optimization algorithms are pivotal in advancing various scientific and industrial fields but often encounter obstacles such as trapping in local minima, saddle points, and plateaus (flat regions), which makes the convergence to reasonable…
Proximal gradient algorithms (PGA), while foundational for inverse problems like image reconstruction, often yield unstable convergence and suboptimal solutions by violating the critical non-negativity constraint. We identify the gradient…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…
The note considers normalized gradient descent (NGD), a natural modification of classical gradient descent (GD) in optimization problems. A serious shortcoming of GD in non-convex problems is that GD may take arbitrarily long to escape from…
Gradient-based optimization drives the unprecedented performance of modern deep neural network models across diverse applications. Adaptive algorithms have accelerated neural network training due to their rapid convergence rates; however,…
We prove local convergence of several notable gradient descent algorithms used in machine learning, for which standard stochastic gradient descent theory does not apply directly. This includes, first, online algorithms for recurrent models…
We study Stochastic Gradient Descent with AdaGrad stepsizes: a popular adaptive (self-tuning) method for first-order stochastic optimization. Despite being well studied, existing analyses of this method suffer from various shortcomings:…