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Stochastic gradient methods enable learning probabilistic models from large amounts of data. While large step-sizes (learning rates) have shown to be best for least-squares (e.g., Gaussian noise) once combined with parameter averaging,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-22 Dmitry Babichev , Francis Bach

In this work, we propose an adaptive variation on the classical Heavy-ball method for convex quadratic minimization. The adaptivity crucially relies on so-called "Polyak step-sizes", which consists in using the knowledge of the optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-13 Baptiste Goujaud , Adrien Taylor , Aymeric Dieuleveut

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Jean-François Aujol , Jérémie Bigot , Camille Castera

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for strongly convex functions converges at the rate $\bO(1/k)$. However, achieving good results in practice requires tuning the parameters (for example the learning rate) of the algorithm. In this paper we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-15 Adam M. Oberman , Mariana Prazeres

The choice of the stepsize in first-order convex optimization is typically based on the smoothness constant and plays a crucial role in the performance of algorithms. Recently, there has been a resurgent interest in introducing adaptive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-04 Reza Rahimi Baghbadorani , Sergio Grammatico , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani

Stochastic gradient descent algorithms for training linear and kernel predictors are gaining more and more importance, thanks to their scalability. While various methods have been proposed to speed up their convergence, the model selection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-06-17 Francesco Orabona

Gradient descent is slow to converge for ill-conditioned problems and non-convex problems. An important technique for acceleration is step-size adaptation. The first part of this paper contains a detailed review of step-size adaptation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Hengshuai Yao

This paper studies the last iterate of subgradient method with Polyak step size when applied to the minimization of a nonsmooth convex function with bounded subgradients. We show that the subgradient method with Polyak step size achieves a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-23 Moslem Zamani , François Glineur

In this paper we present the greedy step averaging(GSA) method, a parameter-free stochastic optimization algorithm for a variety of machine learning problems. As a gradient-based optimization method, GSA makes use of the information from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-14 Xiatian Zhang , Fan Yao , Yongjun Tian

We propose a tuning-free dynamic SGD step size formula, which we call Distance over Gradients (DoG). The DoG step sizes depend on simple empirical quantities (distance from the initial point and norms of gradients) and have no ``learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Maor Ivgi , Oliver Hinder , Yair Carmon

A new type of stepsize, which was recently introduced by Liu and Liu (Optimization, 67(3), 427-440, 2018), is called approximately optimal stepsize and is quit efficient for gradient method. Interestingly, all gradient methods can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-25 Zexian Liu , Hongwei Liu

In smooth strongly convex optimization, knowledge of the strong convexity parameter is critical for obtaining simple methods with accelerated rates. In this work, we study a class of methods, based on Polyak steps, where this knowledge is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-06 Mathieu Barré , Adrien Taylor , Alexandre d'Aspremont

We propose and study Sparse Polyak, a variant of Polyak's adaptive step size, designed to solve high-dimensional statistical estimation problems where the problem dimension is allowed to grow much faster than the sample size. In such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-16 Tianqi Qiao , Marie Maros

The stochastic Polyak step size (SPS) has proven to be a promising choice for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), delivering competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art methods on smooth convex and non-convex optimization problems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-22 Dimitris Oikonomou , Nicolas Loizou

Recent works by Altschuler and Parrilo and the authors have shown that it is possible to accelerate the convergence of gradient descent on smooth convex functions, even without momentum, just by picking special stepsizes. In this paper, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Benjamin Grimmer , Kevin Shu , Alex L. Wang

We study the problem of parameter-free stochastic optimization, inquiring whether, and under what conditions, do fully parameter-free methods exist: these are methods that achieve convergence rates competitive with optimally tuned methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Amit Attia , Tomer Koren

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-05 Igor Konnov

Tuning hyperparameters, such as the stepsize, presents a major challenge of training machine learning models. To address this challenge, numerous adaptive optimization algorithms have been developed that achieve near-optimal complexities,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Florian Hübler , Junchi Yang , Xiang Li , Niao He

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular tool in training large-scale machine learning models. Its performance, however, is highly variable, depending crucially on the choice of the step sizes. Accordingly, a variety of strategies for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-11 Xiaoyu Li , Zhenxun Zhuang , Francesco Orabona

Approximate dynamic programming (ADP) has proven itself in a wide range of applications spanning large-scale transportation problems, health care, revenue management, and energy systems. The design of effective ADP algorithms has many…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-07-15 Ilya O. Ryzhov , Peter I. Frazier , Warren B. Powell