Related papers: Comparing BFGS and OGR for Second-Order Optimizati…
The BFGS quasi-Newton methodology, popular for smooth minimization, has also proved surprisingly effective in nonsmooth optimization. Through a variety of simple examples and computational experiments, we explore how the BFGS matrix update…
An algorithm is proposed for solving optimization problems arising in neural network training for supervised learning. The unique feature of the algorithm is the use of an auxiliary loss, in addition to the original loss employed for model…
This work demonstrates the utility of gradients for the global optimization of certain differentiable functions with many suboptimal local minima. To this end, a principle for generating search directions from non-local quadratic…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
Optimizing smooth convex functions in stochastic settings, where only noisy estimates of gradients and Hessians are available, is a fundamental problem in optimization. While first-order methods possess a low per-iteration cost, their…
Following early work on Hessian-free methods for deep learning, we study a stochastic generalized Gauss-Newton method (SGN) for training DNNs. SGN is a second-order optimization method, with efficient iterations, that we demonstrate to…
Recently several methods were proposed for sparse optimization which make careful use of second-order information [10, 28, 16, 3] to improve local convergence rates. These methods construct a composite quadratic approximation using Hessian…
This paper considers decentralized stochastic optimization over a network of $n$ nodes, where each node possesses a smooth non-convex local cost function and the goal of the networked nodes is to find an $\epsilon$-accurate first-order…
In this paper, we study stochastic non-convex optimization with non-convex random functions. Recent studies on non-convex optimization revolve around establishing second-order convergence, i.e., converging to a nearly second-order optimal…
L-BFGS is the state-of-the-art optimization method for many large scale inverse problems. It has a small memory footprint and achieves superlinear convergence. The method approximates Hessian based on an initial approximation and an update…
We develop Policy Gradient with Second-Order Momentum (PG-SOM), a lightweight second-order optimisation scheme for reinforcement-learning policies. PG-SOM augments the classical REINFORCE update with two exponentially weighted statistics: a…
In this paper, the convergence rates of two algorithms for the online quantum states reconstruction with Gaussian measurement noise in continuous weak measurement are studied, one is the online proximal gradient-based alternating direction…
In this paper, we investigate the theoretical properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for statistical inference in the context of nonconvex optimization problems, which have been relatively unexplored compared to convex settings.…
In online convex optimization (OCO), a decision-maker is confronted with an unknown environment and seeks to play an optimal sequence of decisions on a short time-scale using only past information. Recent advances in second-order OCO…
Matrix completion, where we wish to recover a low rank matrix by observing a few entries from it, is a widely studied problem in both theory and practice with wide applications. Most of the provable algorithms so far on this problem have…
We study online covariance matrix estimation for Polyak--Ruppert averaged stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The online batch-means estimator of Zhu, Chen and Wu (2023) achieves an operator-norm convergence rate of $O(n^{-(1-\alpha)/4})$,…
We propose a fast second-order method that can be used as a drop-in replacement for current deep learning solvers. Compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), it only requires two additional forward-mode automatic differentiation…
The question of how to parallelize the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method has received much attention in the literature. In this paper, we focus instead on batch methods that use a sizeable fraction of the training set at each…
We develop and analyze several different second-order algorithms for computing a near-optimal solution path of a convex parametric optimization problem with smooth Hessian. Our algorithms are inspired by a differential equation perspective…
In this paper, we propose a first second-order scheme based on arbitrary non-Euclidean norms, incorporated by Bregman distances. They are introduced directly in the Newton iterate with regularization parameter proportional to the square…