Related papers: High-accuracy log-concave sampling with stochastic…
The proximal gradient algorithm has been popularly used for convex optimization. Recently, it has also been extended for nonconvex problems, and the current state-of-the-art is the nonmonotone accelerated proximal gradient algorithm.…
We consider stochastic convex optimization with a strongly convex (but not necessarily smooth) objective. We give an algorithm which performs only gradient updates with optimal rate of convergence.
We show that convex-concave Lipschitz stochastic saddle point problems (also known as stochastic minimax optimization) can be solved under the constraint of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy with \emph{strong (primal-dual) gap} rate…
Convex composition optimization is an emerging topic that covers a wide range of applications arising from stochastic optimal control, reinforcement learning and multi-stage stochastic programming. Existing algorithms suffer from…
We study the {\em robust proper learning} of univariate log-concave distributions (over continuous and discrete domains). Given a set of samples drawn from an unknown target distribution, we want to compute a log-concave hypothesis…
In many contemporary optimization problems such as those arising in machine learning, it can be computationally challenging or even infeasible to evaluate an entire function or its derivatives. This motivates the use of stochastic…
Stochastic gradient descent is a canonical tool for addressing stochastic optimization problems, and forms the bedrock of modern machine learning and statistics. In this work, we seek to balance the fact that attenuating step-size is…
In this paper, we consider multi-stage stochastic optimization problems with convex objectives and conic constraints at each stage. We present a new stochastic first-order method, namely the dynamic stochastic approximation (DSA) algorithm,…
We study the problem of estimating low-rank matrices from linear measurements (a.k.a., matrix sensing) through nonconvex optimization. We propose an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve a nonconvex…
We consider convex stochastic optimization problems under different assumptions on the properties of available stochastic subgradient. It is known that, if the value of the objective function is available, one can obtain, in parallel,…
Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…
We provide a detailed study on the implicit bias of gradient descent when optimizing loss functions with strictly monotone tails, such as the logistic loss, over separable datasets. We look at two basic questions: (a) what are the…
Understanding the complexity of sampling from a strongly log-concave and log-smooth distribution $\pi$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$ to high accuracy is a fundamental problem, both from a practical and theoretical standpoint. In practice, high-accuracy…
We prove that stochastic gradient descent efficiently converges to the global optimizer of the maximum likelihood objective of an unknown linear time-invariant dynamical system from a sequence of noisy observations generated by the system.…
Several recent works address the impact of inexact oracles in the convergence analysis of modern first-order optimization techniques, e.g. Bregman Proximal Gradient and Prox-Linear methods as well as their accelerated variants, extending…
Online and stochastic gradient methods have emerged as potent tools in large scale optimization with both smooth convex and nonsmooth convex problems from the classes $C^{1,1}(\reals^p)$ and $C^{1,0}(\reals^p)$ respectively. However to our…
While the convergence behaviors of stochastic gradient methods are well understood \emph{in expectation}, there still exist many gaps in the understanding of their convergence with \emph{high probability}, where the convergence rate has a…
The stochastic gradient Langevin Dynamics is one of the most fundamental algorithms to solve sampling problems and non-convex optimization appearing in several machine learning applications. Especially, its variance reduced versions have…
Heavy-tailed noise is pervasive in modern machine learning applications, arising from data heterogeneity, outliers, and non-stationary stochastic environments. While second-order methods can significantly accelerate convergence in…
In this note we give a simple proof for the convergence of stochastic gradient (SGD) methods on $\mu$-convex functions under a (milder than standard) $L$-smoothness assumption. We show that for carefully chosen stepsizes SGD converges after…