Related papers: Unbiased and Biased Variance-Reduced Forward-Refle…
We consider the problem of minimizing the composition of a smooth (nonconvex) function and a smooth vector mapping, where the inner mapping is in the form of an expectation over some random variable or a finite sum. We propose a stochastic…
This paper explores the non-convex composition optimization in the form including inner and outer finite-sum functions with a large number of component functions. This problem arises in some important applications such as nonlinear…
Due to the limited number of bits in floating-point or fixed-point arithmetic, rounding is a necessary step in many computations. Although rounding methods can be tailored for different applications, round-off errors are generally…
We present a uniform analysis of biased stochastic gradient methods for minimizing convex, strongly convex, and non-convex composite objectives, and identify settings where bias is useful in stochastic gradient estimation. The framework we…
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. This point of view covers the stochastic gradient…
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. More precisely, we interpret a large class of…
We revisit the classical problem of estimating an unknown distribution from its samples by fitting a mixture model that minimizes cross-entropy loss. Framing the task as a stochastic convex optimization problem over the space of $ M…
In this note we propose a new variant of the hybrid variance-reduced proximal gradient method in [7] to solve a common stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problem under standard assumptions. We simply replace the independent…
Learning representation from relative similarity comparisons, often called ordinal embedding, gains rising attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods are batch methods designed mainly based on the convex optimization, say, the…
In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…
In this paper, we introduce a new approach to constructing unbiased estimators when computing expectations of path functionals associated with stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Our randomization idea is closely related to…
Despite the rise to fame of incremental variance-reduced methods in recent years, their use in nonsmooth optimization is still limited to few simple cases. This is due to the fact that existing methods require to evaluate the proximity…
The low-rank stochastic semidefinite optimization has attracted rising attention due to its wide range of applications. The nonconvex reformulation based on the low-rank factorization, significantly improves the computational efficiency but…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
This paper presents an algorithmic framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems using only stochastic function evaluations. We employ central finite-difference based gradient estimation methods to approximate the…
Motivated by applications arising from large scale optimization and machine learning, we consider stochastic quasi-Newton (SQN) methods for solving unconstrained convex optimization problems. The convergence analysis of the SQN methods,…
Learning representation from relative similarity comparisons, often called ordinal embedding, gains rising attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods are based on semi-definite programming (\textit{SDP}), which is generally…
Inference for models with recursively defined likelihoods is computationally demanding, limiting scalability to large datasets. We propose a stabilised weighted subsampling methodology for accelerated inference based on an unbiased…
Variance reduction techniques such as SPIDER/SARAH/STORM have been extensively studied to improve the convergence rates of stochastic non-convex optimization, which usually maintain and update a sequence of estimators for a single function…
Learning low-dimensional latent representations is a central topic in statistics and machine learning, and rotation methods have long been used to obtain sparse and interpretable representations. Despite nearly a century of widespread use…