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We develop methods for parameter estimation in settings with large-scale data sets, where traditional methods are no longer tenable. Our methods rely on stochastic approximations, which are computationally efficient as they maintain one…
We study high-probability convergence in online learning, in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. To combat the heavy tails, a general framework of nonlinear SGD methods is considered, subsuming several popular nonlinearities like sign,…
The study of tail behaviour of SGD-induced processes has been attracting a lot of interest, due to offering strong guarantees with respect to individual runs of an algorithm. While many works provide high-probability guarantees, quantifying…
This paper considers decentralized stochastic optimization over a network of $n$ nodes, where each node possesses a smooth non-convex local cost function and the goal of the networked nodes is to find an $\epsilon$-accurate first-order…
We develop a worst-case complexity theory for stochastically preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (SPSGD) and its accelerated variants under heavy-tailed noise, a setting that encompasses widely used adaptive methods such as Adam,…
First-order stochastic methods for solving large-scale non-convex optimization problems are widely used in many big-data applications, e.g. training deep neural networks as well as other complex and potentially non-convex machine learning…
Recent studies have provided both empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in various scenarios. Such heavy tails potentially result in iterates with diverging…
Motivated by understanding and analysis of large-scale machine learning under heavy-tailed gradient noise, we study decentralized optimization with gradient clipping, i.e., in which certain clipping operators are applied to the gradients or…
In view of a direct and simple improvement of vanilla SGD, this paper presents a fine-tuning of its step-sizes in the mini-batch case. For doing so, one estimates curvature, based on a local quadratic model and using only noisy gradient…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
In the era of large-scale neural network models, optimization algorithms often struggle with generalization due to an overreliance on training loss. One key insight widely accepted in the machine learning community is the idea that wide…
Machine learning, especially deep neural networks, has been rapidly developed in fields including computer vision, speech recognition and reinforcement learning. Although Mini-batch SGD is one of the most popular stochastic optimization…
We study convergence in high-probability of SGD-type methods in non-convex optimization and the presence of heavy-tailed noise. To combat the heavy-tailed noise, a general black-box nonlinear framework is considered, subsuming…
We study distributed stochastic gradient (D-SG) method and its accelerated variant (D-ASG) for solving decentralized strongly convex stochastic optimization problems where the objective function is distributed over several computational…
In this paper, the problem of distributed optimization is studied via a network of agents. Each agent only has access to a noisy gradient of its own objective function, and can communicate with its neighbors via a network. To handle this…
We study convex optimization problems under differential privacy (DP). With heavy-tailed gradients, existing works achieve suboptimal rates. The main obstacle is that existing gradient estimators have suboptimal tail properties, resulting…
Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…
We establish the O($\frac{1}{k}$) convergence rate for distributed stochastic gradient methods that operate over strongly convex costs and random networks. The considered class of methods is standard each node performs a weighted average of…
We study a scalable alternative to robust gradient descent (RGD) techniques that can be used when the gradients can be heavy-tailed, though this will be unknown to the learner. The core technique is simple: instead of trying to robustly…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…