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Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…
We study the unconstrained minimization of a smooth and strongly convex population loss function under a stochastic oracle that introduces both additive and multiplicative noise; this is a canonical and widely-studied setting that arises…
In machine learning, nonconvex optimization problems with multiple local optimums are often encountered. Graduated Optimization Algorithm (GOA) is a popular heuristic method to obtain global optimums of nonconvex problems through…
In this paper, we propose a new technique named \textit{Stochastic Path-Integrated Differential EstimatoR} (SPIDER), which can be used to track many deterministic quantities of interest with significantly reduced computational cost. We…
We propose a statistical adaptive procedure called SALSA for automatically scheduling the learning rate (step size) in stochastic gradient methods. SALSA first uses a smoothed stochastic line-search procedure to gradually increase the…
Stochastic First-Order (SFO) methods have been a cornerstone in addressing a broad spectrum of modern machine learning (ML) challenges. However, their efficacy is increasingly questioned, especially in large-scale applications where…
The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a powerful optimization solver in machine learning. Recently, stochastic ADMM has been integrated with variance reduction methods for stochastic gradient, leading to SAG-ADMM and…
In this work we consider the stochastic minimization of nonsmooth convex loss functions, a central problem in machine learning. We propose a novel algorithm called Accelerated Nonsmooth Stochastic Gradient Descent (ANSGD), which exploits…
Variance reduction is a crucial tool for improving the slow convergence of stochastic gradient descent. Only a few variance-reduced methods, however, have yet been shown to directly benefit from Nesterov's acceleration techniques to match…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
This work examines the convergence of stochastic gradient-based optimization algorithms that use early stopping based on a validation function. The form of early stopping we consider is that optimization terminates when the norm of the…
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…
High-dimensional non-convex optimization problems in engineering design, control, and learning are often hindered by saddle points, flat plateaus, and strongly anisotropic curvature. This paper develops a unified, curvature-adaptive…
This paper studies the unconstrained nonconvex-strongly-convex bilevel optimization problem. A common approach to solving this problem is to alternately update the upper-level and lower-level variables using (biased) stochastic gradients or…
We consider the stochastic composition optimization problem proposed in \cite{wang2017stochastic}, which has applications ranging from estimation to statistical and machine learning. We propose the first ADMM-based algorithm named…
This paper considers a class of convex constrained nonsmooth convex stochastic composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable convex component, together with a general nonsmooth but…
Stochastic gradient algorithms estimate the gradient based on only one or a few samples and enjoy low computational cost per iteration. They have been widely used in large-scale optimization problems. However, stochastic gradient algorithms…
We study stochastic nonconvex optimization under heavy-tailed noise. In this setting, the stochastic gradients only have bounded $p$-th central moment ($p$-BCM) for some $p \in (1,2]$. Building on the foundational work of Arjevani et al.…
In stochastic convex optimization problems, most existing adaptive methods rely on prior knowledge about the diameter bound $D$ when the smoothness or the Lipschitz constant is unknown. This often significantly affects performance as only a…
Smooth minimax optimization problems play a central role in a wide range of applications, including machine learning, game theory, and operations research. However, existing algorithmic frameworks vary significantly depending on the problem…