Related papers: Breaking the Stochasticity Barrier: An Adaptive Va…
In this paper, a general stochastic optimization procedure is studied, unifying several variants of the stochastic gradient descent such as, among others, the stochastic heavy ball method, the Stochastic Nesterov Accelerated Gradient…
Many important machine learning applications amount to solving minimax optimization problems, and in many cases there is no access to the gradient information, but only the function values. In this paper, we focus on such a gradient-free…
In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-level compositional optimization, where the objective function is a composition of multiple smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Existing methods for solving this problem…
This paper introduces a new proximal stochastic gradient method with variance reduction and stabilization for minimizing the sum of a convex stochastic function and a group sparsity-inducing regularization function. Since the method may be…
In this paper, we propose an interior-point method for linearly constrained optimization problems (possibly nonconvex). The method - which we call the Hessian barrier algorithm (HBA) - combines a forward Euler discretization of Hessian…
Like many optimization algorithms, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) is sensitive to the choice of the learning rate. If the learning rate is too small, the optimization process may be slow, and the algorithm might get stuck in local…
We propose an adaptive variance-reduction method, called AdaSpider, for minimization of $L$-smooth, non-convex functions with a finite-sum structure. In essence, AdaSpider combines an AdaGrad-inspired [Duchi et al., 2011, McMahan &…
In this work, we consider convex optimization problems with smooth objective function and nonsmooth functional constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called Stochastic Halfspace Approximation Method (SHAM), to solve…
A framework is introduced for sequentially solving convex stochastic minimization problems, where the objective functions change slowly, in the sense that the distance between successive minimizers is bounded. The minimization problems are…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
Although stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants (e.g., stochastic momentum methods, AdaGrad) are the choice of algorithms for solving non-convex problems (especially deep learning), there still remain big gaps between the…
While Variational Inequality (VI) is a well-established mathematical framework that subsumes Nash equilibrium and saddle-point problems, less is known about its extension, Quasi-Variational Inequalities (QVI). QVI allows for cases where the…
Variance reduction has emerged in recent years as a strong competitor to stochastic gradient descent in non-convex problems, providing the first algorithms to improve upon the converge rate of stochastic gradient descent for finding…
A stochastic-gradient-based interior-point algorithm for minimizing a continuously differentiable objective function (that may be nonconvex) subject to bound constraints is presented, analyzed, and demonstrated through experimental results.…
In recent years, nonconvex minimax problems have attracted significant attention due to their broad applications in machine learning, including generative adversarial networks, robust optimization and adversarial training. Most existing…
We study stochastic decentralized optimization for the problem of training machine learning models with large-scale distributed data. We extend the widely used EXTRA and DIGing methods with variance reduction (VR), and propose two methods:…
We present adaptive gradient methods (both basic and accelerated) for solving convex composite optimization problems in which the main part is approximately smooth (a.k.a. $(\delta, L)$-smooth) and can be accessed only via a (potentially…
Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…
In this work, we propose a distributed algorithm for stochastic non-convex optimization. We consider a worker-server architecture where a set of $K$ worker nodes (WNs) in collaboration with a server node (SN) jointly aim to minimize a…