Gradient-based Monte Carlo sampling algorithms, like Langevin dynamics and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, are important methods for Bayesian inference. In large-scale settings, full-gradients are not affordable and thus stochastic gradients evaluated on mini-batches are used as a replacement. In order to reduce the high vari…
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Stochastic gradient algorithms estimate the gradient based on only one or a few samples and enjoy low computational cost per iteration. They have been widely used in large-scale optimization problems. However, stochastic gradient algorithms are usually slow to converge and achieve sub-linear convergence rates, due to t…
In the paper, we study the stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for the nonconvex optimizations, and propose three classes of the nonconvex stochastic ADMM with variance reduction, based on different reduced variance stochastic gradients. Specifically, the first class called the nonconvex stoch…
In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods have proven to be very successful in supervised learning. However, their adaptation…
A new hybrid algorithm reduces stochastic gradient evaluations for nonconvex optimization.
Improved SVRG method using BB techniques for faster convergence.
A new algorithm SRG-DQN reduces variance in deep Q-learning.
New algorithm improves convergence of AUC maximization.
FGD reduces noisy gradient variance in SGD for neural networks.
Memory-efficient algorithm reduces variance in off-policy RL.
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with conventional stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithm that uses two reference …
STORM-PG uses momentum for faster policy gradient updates.
Large batch sizes reduce gradient variance in DP-SGD, improving privacy.
It is well known that Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods scale poorly with dataset size. A popular class of methods for solving this issue is stochastic gradient MCMC. These methods use a noisy estimate of the gradient of the log posterior, which reduces the per iteration computational cost of the algorithm. Despi…
Proposes reducing random error in stochastic optimization by variance regularization.
New sparsity operator reduces variance reduction methods' computational cost.
A new method reduces variance in SGMCMC by preferentially subsampling data.
A new method reduces the complexity of decentralized optimization.
Several useful variance-reduced stochastic gradient algorithms, such as SVRG, SAGA, Finito, and SAG, have been proposed to minimize empirical risks with linear convergence properties to the exact minimizer. The existing convergence results assume uniform data sampling with replacement. However, it has been observed in …
New scheme adapts batch size for faster variance-reduced algorithms.
The paper analyzes SW-SGD for MSE in biased and variance-reduced gradient estimators.
New method reduces variance in complex probabilistic model optimization.
Byrd-SAGA reduces variance to robustify SGD against Byzantine attacks.
Paper improves convergence rate of Langevin Dynamics algorithms.
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 embedding and reinforcement learning. Although existing approaches such as stochastic gr…
Stochastic particle-optimization sampling (SPOS) is a recently-developed scalable Bayesian sampling framework that unifies stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) algorithms based on Wasserstein gradient flows. With a rigorous non-asymptotic convergence theory developed recently…
A new gradient tree boosting framework reduces variance and accelerates performance.
VRSGT algorithm reduces orthogonality constraints in decentralized optimization.
Stochastic Variance-Reduced Cubic regularization (SVRC) algorithms have received increasing attention due to its improved gradient/Hessian complexities (i.e., number of queries to stochastic gradient/Hessian oracles) to find local minima for nonconvex finite-sum optimization. However, it is unclear whether existing SVR…
We introduce Kalman Gradient Descent, a stochastic optimization algorithm that uses Kalman filtering to adaptively reduce gradient variance in stochastic gradient descent by filtering the gradient estimates. We present both a theoretical analysis of convergence in a non-convex setting and experimental results which dem…
Variance reduction (VR) methods boost the performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by enabling the use of larger, constant stepsizes and preserving linear convergence rates. However, current variance reduced SGD methods require either high memory usage or an exact gradient computation (using the entire dataset)…
New method improves convergence and reduces variance in noisy optimization problems.
Stochastic variance reduction algorithms have recently become popular for minimizing the average of a large, but finite, number of loss functions. In this paper, we propose a novel Riemannian extension of the Euclidean stochastic variance reduced gradient algorithm (R-SVRG) to a compact manifold search space. To this e…
In recent years, stochastic variance reduction algorithms have attracted considerable attention for minimizing the average of a large but finite number of loss functions. This paper proposes a novel Riemannian extension of the Euclidean stochastic variance reduced gradient (R-SVRG) algorithm to a manifold search space.…
Unified analysis of stochastic gradient methods for convex and smooth optimization.
Paper proposes SCott optimizer to reduce forecasting model training variance.
Many machine learning, statistical inference, and portfolio optimization problems require minimization of a composition of expected value functions (CEVF). Of particular interest is the finite-sum versions of such compositional optimization problems (FS-CEVF). Compositional stochastic variance reduced gradient (C-SVRG)…
Improved training of large-scale neural networks with reduced variance noise.
The paper analyzes variance reduction in stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics.
Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large-scale machine learning problems, by virtue of its light complexity per iteration. However, it lags behind its non-stochastic counterparts with respect to the convergence rate, due to high variance introduced by the stochastic updates. The popular Stochastic …
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have achieved human-level performance on a variety of real-world applications. However, the current algorithms still suffer from poor gradient estimation with excessive variance, resulting in unstable training and poor sample efficiency. In our paper, we proposed an innova…
Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is often excessive, leading to poor sample efficiency. In this paper, we apply the stoc…
Improved robustness in optimization methods using second-order information.
As application demands for zeroth-order (gradient-free) optimization accelerate, the need for variance reduced and faster converging approaches is also intensifying. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting: a) a comprehensive theoretical analysis of variance reduced zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, b) a nove…
We generalize stochastic smoothing for gradient estimation of non-differentiable functions.
This paper tackles variance issues in GNN training by proposing a method to reduce both embedding and gradient variances.
New methods solve graph sparsity optimization problems faster.
New algorithm reduces variance in stochastic gradient estimation.