Related papers: Step-Size Stability in Stochastic Optimization: A …
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…
This paper proposes a new steepest gradient descent method for solving nonconvex finite minimax problems using non-monotone adaptive step sizes and providing proof of convergence results in cases of the nonconvex, quasiconvex, and…
For solving finite-sum optimization problems, SGD without replacement sampling is empirically shown to outperform SGD. Denoting by $n$ the number of components in the cost and $K$ the number of epochs of the algorithm , several recent works…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and adaptive gradient methods, such as Adam and RMSProp, have been widely used in training deep neural networks. We empirically show that while the difference between the standard generalization performance…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) plays a central role in modern machine learning. While there is extensive work on providing error upper bound for SGD, not much is known about SGD error lower bound. In this paper, we study the convergence…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…
The non-asymptotic analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) typically yields bounds that decompose into a bias term and a variance term. In this work, we focus on the bias component and study the extent to which SGD can match the…
In this contribution, we present a full overview of the continuous stochastic gradient (CSG) method, including convergence results, step size rules and algorithmic insights. We consider optimization problems in which the objective function…
In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original stochastic variance reduction gradient (SVRG), where hereafter we refer to as the variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Different from the choices of the snapshot…
Although stochastic optimization is central to modern machine learning, the precise mechanisms underlying its success, and in particular, the precise role of the stochasticity, still remain unclear. Modelling stochastic optimization…
Recent studies have shown that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic optimization and that the heaviness of the tails have links to the generalization error. While these studies have shed light on interesting aspects of the generalization…
We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…
Using gradient descent (GD) with fixed or decaying step-size is a standard practice in unconstrained optimization problems. However, when the loss function is only locally convex, such a step-size schedule artificially slows GD down as it…
The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…
In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…
Stochastic variance reduced methods have shown strong performance in solving finite-sum problems. However, these methods usually require the users to manually tune the step-size, which is time-consuming or even infeasible for some…
SGD with momentum (SGDM) has been widely applied in many machine learning tasks, and it is often applied with dynamic stepsizes and momentum weights tuned in a stagewise manner. Despite of its empirical advantage over SGD, the role of…
This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of a broad range of variations of the stochastic proximal point method (SPPM). Proximal point methods have attracted considerable interest owing to their numerical stability and robustness…