Related papers: Breaking the Stochasticity Barrier: An Adaptive Va…

We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…

SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent…

Sign stochastic gradient descent (signSGD) is a communication-efficient method that transmits only the sign of stochastic gradients for parameter updating. Existing literature has demonstrated that signSGD can achieve a convergence rate of…

In this paper, we propose a stochastic method for solving equality constrained optimization problems that utilizes predictive variance reduction. Specifically, we develop a method based on the sequential quadratic programming paradigm that…

We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball…

We develop a new algorithm for non-convex stochastic optimization that finds an $\epsilon$-critical point in the optimal $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector product computations. Our algorithm uses Hessian-vector…

A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…

Adaptive gradient methods such as RMSProp and Adam use exponential moving estimate of the squared gradient to compute adaptive step sizes, achieving better convergence than SGD in face of noisy objectives. However, Adam can have undesirable…

Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large scale optimization of machine learning objective functions. Yet, its performance is greatly variable and heavily depends on the choice of the stepsizes. This has motivated a…

Gradient clipping is a standard training technique used in deep learning applications such as large-scale language modeling to mitigate exploding gradients. Recent experimental studies have demonstrated a fairly special behavior in the…

Value iteration-type methods have been extensively studied for computing a nearly optimal value function in reinforcement learning (RL). Under a generative sampling model, these methods can achieve sharper sample complexity than policy…

An inexact accelerated stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (AS-ADMM) scheme is developed for solving structured separable convex optimization problems with linear constraints. The objective function is the sum of a…

Nonconvex-concave min-max problem arises in many machine learning applications including minimizing a pointwise maximum of a set of nonconvex functions and robust adversarial training of neural networks. A popular approach to solve this…

This paper presents ConVex optimization-based Stochastic steady-state Tracking Error Minimization (CV-STEM), a new state feedback control framework for a class of Ito stochastic nonlinear systems and Lagrangian systems. Its innovation lies…

Nonconvex minimax problems appear frequently in emerging machine learning applications, such as generative adversarial networks and adversarial learning. Simple algorithms such as the gradient descent ascent (GDA) are the common practice…

In this paper, we develop a stochastic set-valued optimization (SVO) framework tailored for robust machine learning. In the SVO setting, each decision variable is mapped to a set of objective values, and optimality is defined via set…

In this paper, we develop a new accelerated stochastic gradient method for efficiently solving the convex regularized empirical risk minimization problem in mini-batch settings. The use of mini-batches is becoming a golden standard in the…

Learning representation from relative similarity comparisons, often called ordinal embedding, gains rising attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods are based on semi-definite programming (\textit{SDP}), which is generally…

Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…

We consider the problem of minimizing a non-convex objective while preserving the privacy of the examples in the training data. Building upon the previous variance-reduced algorithm SpiderBoost, we introduce a new framework that utilizes…