Related papers: Comparing BFGS and OGR for Second-Order Optimizati…
Gradient descent is the primary workhorse for optimizing large-scale problems in machine learning. However, its performance is highly sensitive to the choice of the learning rate. A key limitation of gradient descent is its lack of natural…
Pruning neural networks reduces inference time and memory costs. On standard hardware, these benefits will be especially prominent if coarse-grained structures, like feature maps, are pruned. We devise two novel saliency-based methods for…
Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…
Quasi-Newton methods are ubiquitous in deterministic local search due to their efficiency and low computational cost. This class of methods uses the history of gradient evaluations to approximate second-order derivatives. However, only…
We introduce a hybrid stochastic estimator to design stochastic gradient algorithms for solving stochastic optimization problems. Such a hybrid estimator is a convex combination of two existing biased and unbiased estimators and leads to…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
We study a class of stochastic nonconvex optimization in the form of $\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}} F(x):=\mathbb{E}_\xi [f(\phi(x,\xi))]$, i.e., $F$ is a composition of a convex function $f$ and a random function $\phi$. Leveraging an (implicit)…
In this paper, we study Newton-conjugate gradient (Newton-CG) methods for minimizing a nonconvex function $f$ whose Hessian is $(H_f,\nu)$-H\"older continuous with modulus $H_f>0$ and exponent $\nu\in(0,1]$. Recently proposed Newton-CG…
We propose an extension of a special form of gradient descent -- in the literature known as linearised Bregman iteration -- to a larger class of non-convex functions. We replace the classical (squared) two norm metric in the gradient…
We study the convergence rate of Bregman gradient methods for convex optimization in the space of measures on a $d$-dimensional manifold. Under basic regularity assumptions, we show that the suboptimality gap at iteration $k$ is in…
This paper considers online convex optimization (OCO) problems - the paramount framework for online learning algorithm design. The loss function of learning task in OCO setting is based on streaming data so that OCO is a powerful tool to…
In this paper, we consider the online proximal mirror descent for solving the time-varying composite optimization problems. For various applications, the algorithm naturally involves the errors in the gradient and proximal operator. We…
A stochastic second-order trust region method is proposed, which can be viewed as a second-order extension of the trust-region-ish (TRish) algorithm proposed by Curtis et al. (INFORMS J. Optim. 1(3) 200-220, 2019). In each iteration, a…
Gradient dominance property is a condition weaker than strong convexity, yet sufficiently ensures global convergence even in non-convex optimization. This property finds wide applications in machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL),…
Stochastic gradients for deep neural networks exhibit strong correlations along the optimization trajectory, and are often aligned with a small set of Hessian eigenvectors associated with outlier eigenvalues. Recent work shows that…
Online learning algorithms are fast, memory-efficient, easy to implement, and applicable to many prediction problems, including classification, regression, and ranking. Several online algorithms were proposed in the past few decades, some…
Second-order methods are provably faster than first-order methods, and their efficient implementations for large-scale optimization problems have attracted significant attention. Yet, optimization problems in ML often have nonsmooth…
Low-rank matrix estimation under heavy-tailed noise is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs, especially since robust loss…
In this paper we develop an online statistical inference approach for high-dimensional generalized linear models with streaming data for real-time estimation and inference. We propose an online debiased lasso (ODL) method to accommodate the…
Machine learning (ML) problems are often posed as highly nonlinear and nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. Methods for solving ML problems based on stochastic gradient descent are easily scaled for very large problems but may…