Related papers: Complexity reduction in online stochastic Newton m…
This paper proposes a stochastic variant of a classic algorithm---the cubic-regularized Newton method [Nesterov and Polyak 2006]. The proposed algorithm efficiently escapes saddle points and finds approximate local minima for general…
We consider distributed optimization problems where networked nodes cooperatively minimize the sum of their locally known convex costs. A popular class of methods to solve these problems are the distributed gradient methods, which are…
We present a novel statistical inference framework for convex empirical risk minimization, using approximate stochastic Newton steps. The proposed algorithm is based on the notion of finite differences and allows the approximation of a…
In online convex optimization (OCO), a decision-maker is confronted with an unknown environment and seeks to play an optimal sequence of decisions on a short time-scale using only past information. Recent advances in second-order OCO…
We propose a distributed cubic regularization of the Newton method for solving (constrained) empirical risk minimization problems over a network of agents, modeled as undirected graph. The algorithm employs an inexact, preconditioned Newton…
Many data-fitting applications require the solution of an optimization problem involving a sum of large number of functions of high dimensional parameter. Here, we consider the problem of minimizing a sum of $n$ functions over a convex…
We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…
In this paper, we present new second-order algorithms for composite convex optimization, called Contracting-domain Newton methods. These algorithms are affine-invariant and based on global second-order lower approximation for the smooth…
Stochastic second-order methods achieve fast local convergence in strongly convex optimization by using noisy Hessian estimates to precondition the gradient. However, these methods typically reach superlinear convergence only when the…
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…
We propose a distributed, cubic-regularized Newton method for large-scale convex optimization over networks. The proposed method requires only local computations and communications and is suitable for federated learning applications over…
First order methods, which solely rely on gradient information, are commonly used in diverse machine learning (ML) and data analysis (DA) applications. This is attributed to the simplicity of their implementations, as well as low…
This paper presents new projection-free algorithms for Online Convex Optimization (OCO) over a convex domain $\mathcal{K} \subset \mathbb{R}^d$. Classical OCO algorithms (such as Online Gradient Descent) typically need to perform Euclidean…
Optimization plays a key role in machine learning. Recently, stochastic second-order methods have attracted much attention due to their low computational cost in each iteration. However, these algorithms might perform poorly especially if…
We show that, for finite-sum minimization problems, incorporating partial second-order information of the objective function can dramatically improve the robustness to mini-batch size of variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods, making…
We propose a randomized second-order method for optimization known as the Newton Sketch: it is based on performing an approximate Newton step using a randomly projected or sub-sampled Hessian. For self-concordant functions, we prove that…
In this article, we consider the problem of unconstrained time-varying convex optimization, where the cost function changes with time. We provide an in-depth technical analysis of the problem and argue why freezing the cost at each time…
In second-order optimization, a potential bottleneck can be computing the Hessian matrix of the optimized function at every iteration. Randomized sketching has emerged as a powerful technique for constructing estimates of the Hessian which…
In this work, we develop first-order (Hessian-free) and zero-order (derivative-free) implementations of the Cubically regularized Newton method for solving general non-convex optimization problems. For that, we employ finite difference…
Zeroth-order methods have become important tools for solving problems where we have access only to function evaluations. However, the zeroth-order methods only using gradient approximations are $n$ times slower than classical first-order…