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…
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48 results for “variance-reduced gradients”
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…
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 …
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…
New scheme adapts batch size for faster variance-reduced algorithms.
problem Slowness of variance-reduced algorithms due to large batch size.
method Eliminates backtracking line search, adapts batch size via history stochastic gradients.
result Significantly reduces overall complexity for SVRG and SARAH/SPIDER.
Memory-efficient algorithm reduces variance in off-policy RL.
problem High variance in off-policy policy optimization.
method Memory-efficient, stochastically variance-reduced algorithm using off-policy samples.
result Empirically validated effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
A Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient using Barzilai-Borwein Techniques as Second Order Informationmath.OC
Improved SVRG method using BB techniques for faster convergence.
problem Improving the convergence speed of stochastic variance reduction methods.
method Incorporates Barzilai-Borwein (BB) techniques as second-order information into SVRG.
result Proves linear convergence of the proposed method and its variants.
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…
Improved robustness in optimization methods using second-order information.
problem Scalability and sensitivity to mini-batch size in optimization methods.
method Mini-Batch Stochastic Variance-Reduced Newton () algorithm incorporating partial second-order information.
result Achieves a fast linear convergence rate independent of mini-batch size for large data sizes.
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…
STORM-PG uses momentum for faster policy gradient updates.
problem Improving policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning.
method Introduces STORM-PG, a SARAH-based algorithm with exponential moving average.
result Achieves sample complexity, matching best-known rate.
New algorithm improves convergence of AUC maximization.
problem Optimizing AUC for imbalanced classes with stochastic methods.
method Variance Reduced Stochastic Proximal Algorithm for AUC Maximization (VRSPAM).
result VRSPAM converges faster than previous methods.
Unified analysis of stochastic gradient methods for convex and smooth optimization.
problem Minimizing composite convex and smooth functions.
method Unified convergence analysis of various stochastic gradient methods.
result Unified convergence rates for a variety of methods including proximal SGD, variance reduced methods, quantization, and coordinate descent.
A new method reduces variance in PG methods for RL, improving efficiency and convergence.
problem Improving sample efficiency and convergence of policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning.
method Proposes a gradient truncation mechanism and designs TSIVR-PG method to maximize rewards and utility.
result Shows sample complexity of TSIVR-PG to find ε-stationary policy and global ε-optimal policy.
Our goal is to improve variance reducing stochastic methods through better control variates. We first propose a modification of SVRG which uses the Hessian to track gradients over time, rather than to recondition, increasing the correlation of the control variates and leading to faster theoretical convergence close to …
With the purpose of examining biased updates in variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods, we introduce SVAG, a SAG/SAGA-like method with adjustable bias. SVAG is analyzed in a cocoercive root-finding setting, a setting which yields the same results as in the usual smooth convex optimization setting for the ordinary…
We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of convex functions. The applications include empirical risk minimization problems in statistical machine learning where the datasets are large and have to be stored on different machines. We design a distributed stochastic variance reduced gradien…
A new method reduces the complexity of decentralized optimization.
problem Decentralized stochastic non-convex optimization over a network.
method GT-HSGD, a hybrid variance-reduced method.
result Achieves an oracle complexity of O(n^(-1)ε^(-3)) for small ε.
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…
A new hybrid algorithm reduces stochastic gradient evaluations for nonconvex optimization.
problem Solving stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problems efficiently.
method Proposes a new hybrid variance-reduced proximal gradient method with a stochastic gradient estimator.
result Achieves optimal stochastic oracle complexity bound with one less gradient evaluation.
AGDA and variance-reduced methods solve nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problems globally and faster.
problem Solving nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problems in machine learning.
method Global convergence of AGDA and variance-reduced algorithms.
result AGDA and variance-reduced methods achieve global convergence and faster rates.
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)…
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…
Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), a dimensionality reduction and factor analysis method, is a special case in which factor matrices have low-rank nonnegative constraints. Considering the stochastic learning in NMF, we specifically address the multiplicative update (MU) rule, which is the most popular, but which h…
Stochastic variance reduced methods have gained a lot of interest recently for empirical risk minimization due to its appealing run time complexity. When the data size is large and disjointly stored on different machines, it becomes imperative to distribute the implementation of such variance reduced methods. In this p…
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.…
This work bounds the run-time of nonconvex optimization with early stopping.
problem Bounding the expected run-time of nonconvex optimization with early stopping.
method Derives conditions for well-defined early stopping based on validation function norms and bounds the expected number of iterations and gradient evaluations.
result Guarantees the validity of early stopping and provides bounds on the expected run-time for various optimization algorithms.
Paper improves convergence rate of Langevin Dynamics algorithms.
problem Sampling problems and non-convex optimization in machine learning.
method Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient Langevin Dynamics and Stochastic Recursive Gradient Langevin Dynamics with improved convergence rates.
result Proves convergence to objective distribution under weaker conditions.
New methods solve graph sparsity optimization problems faster.
problem Complex graph sparsity optimization problems in disease outbreak monitoring and social network analysis.
method Stochastic variance-reduced gradient-based methods GraphSVRG-IHT and GraphSCSG-IHT.
result Our methods achieve linear convergence speed.
Linear Convergence of Gradient and Proximal-Gradient Methods Under the Polyak-Łojasiewicz Conditioncs.LG
In 1963, Polyak proposed a simple condition that is sufficient to show a global linear convergence rate for gradient descent. This condition is a special case of the Łojasiewicz inequality proposed in the same year, and it does not require strong convexity (or even convexity). In this work, we show that this much-older…
We study the effect of the stochastic gradient noise on the training of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and show that it can prevent the convergence of standard game optimization methods, while the batch version converges. We address this issue with a novel stochastic variance-reduced extragradient (SVRE) optimi…
VRSGT algorithm reduces orthogonality constraints in decentralized optimization.
problem Decentralized optimization with orthogonality constraints.
method VRSGT algorithm with variance reduction and orthogonal techniques.
result VRSGT achieves convergence rate of O(1 / k) for orthogonality constraints.
Recent years have witnessed exciting progress in the study of stochastic variance reduced gradient methods (e.g., SVRG, SAGA), their accelerated variants (e.g, Katyusha) and their extensions in many different settings (e.g., online, sparse, asynchronous, distributed). Among them, accelerated methods enjoy improved conv…
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…
Develops an accelerated algorithm for solving nonmonotone generalized equations.
problem Solving nonmonotone generalized equations with possibly non-accelerated schemes.
method Combines Nesterov's acceleration and variance-reduction techniques for a class of generalized equations.
result Achieves convergence rates, improving upon non-accelerated counterparts.
Stochastic Variance-reduced Gradient Descent for Low-rank Matrix Recovery from Linear Measurementsstat.ML
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 optimization problem of matrix sensing. Our algorithm is applicable to both noisy and…
Don't Jump Through Hoops and Remove Those Loops: SVRG and Katyusha are Better Without the Outer Loopcs.LG
The stochastic variance-reduced gradient method (SVRG) and its accelerated variant (Katyusha) have attracted enormous attention in the machine learning community in the last few years due to their superior theoretical properties and empirical behaviour on training supervised machine learning models via the empirical ri…
Efficient momentum-based methods for reinforcement learning with improved sample complexity.
problem Efficient reinforcement learning algorithms for non-concave performance functions.
method Adaptive momentum-based policy gradient methods using variance reduction and importance sampling techniques.
result Both IS-MBPG and HA-MBPG reach the best known sample complexity of for finding an -stationary point.
Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization assumes convexity or strong convexity of each function. In this paper, we extend t…
Paper proposes SCott optimizer to reduce forecasting model training variance.
problem Large variance in gradient estimation for forecasting models.
method Stratified sampling and control variate to reduce gradient variance.
result SCott optimizer converges faster on time series forecasting problems.
The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a powerful optimization solver in machine learning. Recently, stochastic ADMM has been integrated with variance reduction methods for stochastic gradient, leading to SAG-ADMM and SDCA-ADMM that have fast convergence rates and low iteration complexities. However,…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient decrease criterion, which yields sufficient decrease versions of stochastic varianc…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for variance reduced stochastic gradient descent methods such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient decrease criterion, which yields sufficient decrease versions of variance redu…
We revisit the stochastic variance-reduced policy gradient (SVRPG) method proposed by Papini et al. (2018) for reinforcement learning. We provide an improved convergence analysis of SVRPG and show that it can find an -approximate stationary point of the performance function within trajectories. This s…
New HMC framework reduces variance for sampling from log-concave distributions.
problem Efficient sampling from log-concave distributions with high precision.
method Unified formulation of biased and unbiased variance reduction methods for HMC.
result Unbiased and biased gradient estimators achieve different gradient complexities and accuracy.
Recently, many variance reduced stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) methods (e.g.\ SAG-ADMM, SDCA-ADMM and SVRG-ADMM) have made exciting progress such as linear convergence rates for strongly convex problems. However, the best known convergence rate for general convex problems is O(1/T) as opp…
Many complex domains, such as robotics control and real-time strategy (RTS) games, require an agent to learn a continuous control. In the former, an agent learns a policy over and in the latter, over a discrete set of actions each of which is parametrized by a continuous parameter. Such problems are natu…
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…