Related papers: High-accuracy log-concave sampling with stochastic…

Gradient clipping is a widely used technique in Machine Learning and Deep Learning (DL), known for its effectiveness in mitigating the impact of heavy-tailed noise, which frequently arises in the training of large language models.…

Sampling from various kinds of distributions is an issue of paramount importance in statistics since it is often the key ingredient for constructing estimators, test procedures or confidence intervals. In many situations, the exact sampling…

We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…

We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…

We propose an algorithm to sample from composite log-concave distributions over $\mathbb{R}^d$, i.e., densities of the form $\pi\propto e^{-f-g}$, assuming access to gradient evaluations of $f$ and a restricted Gaussian oracle (RGO) for…

We provide tight upper and lower bounds on the complexity of minimizing the average of $m$ convex functions using gradient and prox oracles of the component functions. We show a significant gap between the complexity of deterministic vs…

We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…

First-order methods for stochastic optimization have undeniable relevance, in part due to their pivotal role in machine learning. Variance reduction for these algorithms has become an important research topic. In contrast to common…

We consider stochastic unconstrained bilevel optimization problems when only the first-order gradient oracles are available. While numerous optimization methods have been proposed for tackling bilevel problems, existing methods either tend…

We provide tight finite-time convergence bounds for gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent on quadratic functions, when the gradients are delayed and reflect iterates from $\tau$ rounds ago. First, we show that without stochastic…

We study the query complexity of min-max optimization of a nonconvex-nonconcave function $f$ over $[0,1]^d \times [0,1]^d$. We show that, given oracle access to $f$ and to its gradient $\nabla f$, any algorithm that finds an…

We consider a family of algorithms that successively sample and minimize simple stochastic models of the objective function. We show that under reasonable conditions on approximation quality and regularity of the models, any such algorithm…

Choosing the optimization algorithm that performs best on a given machine learning problem is often delicate, and there is no guarantee that current state-of-the-art algorithms will perform well across all tasks. Consequently, the more…

Stochastic optimization via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental problem in statistics and optimization. This paper revisits Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for strongly convex objectives, establishing tight, uniform-in-time…

This work, for the first time, introduces two constant factor approximation algorithms with linear query complexity for non-monotone submodular maximization over a ground set of size $n$ subject to a knapsack constraint, $\mathsf{DLA}$ and…

In this paper we consider stochastic weakly convex composite problems, however without the existence of a stochastic subgradient oracle. We present a derivative free algorithm that uses a two point approximation for computing a gradient…

Incremental gradient and incremental proximal methods are a fundamental class of optimization algorithms used for solving finite sum problems, broadly studied in the literature. Yet, without strong convexity, their convergence guarantees…

Stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints have a broad range of applications in intelligent transportation, cyber-security, and smart grids. In this paper, first, we propose an inexact-proximal accelerated…

We present a computational analysis that establishes the $O(1/K)$ convergence of the distributed gradient tracking method when the objective function is smooth and convex but not strongly convex. The analysis is inspired by recent work on…

In this report, we study decentralized stochastic optimization to minimize a sum of smooth and strongly convex cost functions when the functions are distributed over a directed network of nodes. In contrast to the existing work, we use…