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Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…

Distributed optimization is fundamental to modern machine learning applications like federated learning, but existing methods often struggle with ill-conditioned problems and face stability-versus-speed tradeoffs. We introduce fractional…

Based on the stochastic maximum principle for the partially coupled forward-backward stochastic control system (FBSCS for short), a modified method of successive approximations (MSA for short) is established for stochastic recursive optimal…

Subspace optimization methods have the attractive property of reducing large-scale optimization problems to a sequence of low-dimensional subspace optimization problems. However, existing subspace optimization frameworks adopt a fixed…

Simple stochastic momentum methods are widely used in machine learning optimization, but their good practical performance is at odds with an absence of theoretical guarantees of acceleration in the literature. In this work, we aim to close…

In this paper we present a novel quasi-Newton algorithm for use in stochastic optimisation. Quasi-Newton methods have had an enormous impact on deterministic optimisation problems because they afford rapid convergence and computationally…

In this note, we inspect the convergence of a new optimizer for pretraining LLMs, namely the Muon optimizer. Such an optimizer is closely related to a specialized steepest descent method where the update direction is the minimizer of the…

The rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has made low-precision training essential for reducing memory, improving efficiency, and enabling larger models and datasets. Existing convergence theories for adaptive optimizers, however,…

We study estimation in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime for a broad class of Gaussian latent-variable models, including Gaussian mixtures and orbit recovery problems. We show that, in this regime, the generalized method-of-moments…

Machine learning problems with multiple objective functions appear either in learning with multiple criteria where learning has to make a trade-off between multiple performance metrics such as fairness, safety and accuracy; or, in…

We design an algorithm which finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point (with $\|\nabla F(x)\|\le \epsilon$) using $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector products, matching guarantees that were previously available…

We propose a new discrete-time online parameter estimation algorithm that combines two different aspects, one that adds momentum, and another that includes a time-varying learning rate. It is well known that recursive least squares based…

We provide improved convergence rates for various \emph{non-smooth} optimization problems via higher-order accelerated methods. In the case of $\ell_\infty$ regression, we achieves an $O(\epsilon^{-4/5})$ iteration complexity, breaking the…

Motivated by applications arising from large scale optimization and machine learning, we consider stochastic quasi-Newton (SQN) methods for solving unconstrained convex optimization problems. The convergence analysis of the SQN methods,…

Momentum-based gradients are essential for optimizing advanced machine learning models, as they not only accelerate convergence but also advance optimizers to escape stationary points. While most state-of-the-art momentum techniques utilize…

We study fundamental limits of first-order stochastic optimization in a range of nonconvex settings, including L-smooth functions satisfying Quasar-Convexity (QC), Quadratic Growth (QG), and Restricted Secant Inequalities (RSI). While the…

Interest in stochastic zeroth-order (SZO) methods has recently been revived in black-box optimization scenarios such as adversarial black-box attacks to deep neural networks. SZO methods only require the ability to evaluate the objective…

We propose a novel stochastic optimization algorithm called STOchastic Recursive Momentum for Compositional (STORM-Compositional) optimization that minimizes the composition of expectations of two stochastic functions, the latter being an…

We present a new accelerated stochastic second-order method that is robust to both gradient and Hessian inexactness, which occurs typically in machine learning. We establish theoretical lower bounds and prove that our algorithm achieves…

In recent years, the use of prompts to guide the output of Large Language Models have increased dramatically. However, even the best of experts struggle to choose the correct words to stitch up a prompt for the desired task. To solve this,…