In this paper, we study the finite-sum convex optimization problem focusing on the general convex case. Recently, the study of variance reduced (VR) methods and their accelerated variants has made exciting progress. However, the step size used in the existing VR algorithms typically depends on the smoothness parameter, which is often unknown and requires tuning in practice. To address this problem, we propose two novel adaptive VR algorithms: Adaptive Variance Reduced Accelerated Extra-Gradient (AdaVRAE) and Adaptive Variance Reduced Accelerated Gradient (AdaVRAG). Our algorithms do not require knowledge of the smoothness parameter. AdaVRAE uses $\mathcal{O}\left(n\log\log n+\sqrt{\frac{nβ}ε}\right)$ gradient evaluations and AdaVRAG uses $\mathcal{O}\left(n\log\log n+\sqrt{\frac{nβ\logβ}ε}\right)$ gradient evaluations to attain an $\mathcal{O}(ε)$-suboptimal solution, where $n$ is the number of functions in the finite sum and $β$ is the smoothness parameter. This result matches the best-known convergence rate of non-adaptive VR methods and it improves upon the convergence of the state of the art adaptive VR method, AdaSVRG. We demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithms compared with previous methods in experiments on real-world datasets.
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；IBM Almaden Research Center（IBM阿尔马登研究中心）
We propose a novel randomized incremental gradient algorithm, namely, VAriance-Reduced Accelerated Gradient (Varag), for finite-sum optimization. Equipped with a unified step-size policy that adjusts itself to the value of the condition number, Varag exhibits the unified optimal rates of convergence for solving smooth convex finite-sum problems directly regardless of their strong convexity. Moreover, Varag is the first accelerated randomized incremental gradient method that benefits from the strong convexity of the data-fidelity term to achieve the optimal linear convergence. It also establish…
NTT DATA Mathematical Systems Inc.（NTT DATA 数理系统公司）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
In this paper, we develop a new accelerated stochastic gradient method for efficiently solving the convex regularized empirical risk minimization problem in mini-batch settings. The use of mini-batches is becoming a golden standard in the machine learning community, because mini-batch settings stabilize the gradient estimate and can easily make good use of parallel computing. The core of our proposed method is the incorporation of our new "double acceleration" technique and variance reduction technique. We theoretically analyze our proposed method and show that our method much improves the min…
Rutgers Business School（罗格斯商学院）；Penn State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
In this work, we consider strongly convex strongly concave (SCSC) saddle point (SP) problems $\min_{x\in\mathbb{R}^{d_x}}\max_{y\in\mathbb{R}^{d_y}}f(x,y)$ where $f$ is $L$-smooth, $f(.,y)$ is $μ$-strongly convex for every $y$, and $f(x,.)$ is $μ$-strongly concave for every $x$. Such problems arise frequently in machine learning in the context of robust empirical risk minimization (ERM), e.g. $\textit{distributionally robust}$ ERM, where partial gradients are estimated using mini-batches of data points. Assuming we have access to an unbiased stochastic first-order oracle we consider the stocha…
Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, Tsinghua University（清华大学-伯克利深圳学院，清华大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）
In this paper, we introduce a simplified and unified method for finite-sum convex optimization, named \emph{Variance Reduction via Accelerated Dual Averaging (VRADA)}. In both general convex and strongly convex settings, VRADA can attain an $O\big(\frac{1}{n}\big)$-accurate solution in $O(n\log\log n)$ number of stochastic gradient evaluations which improves the best-known result $O(n\log n)$, where $n$ is the number of samples. Meanwhile, VRADA matches the lower bound of the general convex setting up to a $\log\log n$ factor and matches the lower bounds in both regimes $n\le Θ(κ)$ and $n\gg κ…
Algorithms with fast convergence, small number of data access, and low per-iteration complexity are particularly favorable in the big data era, due to the demand for obtaining \emph{highly accurate solutions} to problems with \emph{a large number of samples} in \emph{ultra-high} dimensional space. Existing algorithms lack at least one of these qualities, and thus are inefficient in handling such big data challenge. In this paper, we propose a method enjoying all these merits with an accelerated convergence rate $O(\frac{1}{k^2})$. Empirical studies on large scale datasets with more than one mi…
In this paper, we propose a novel accelerated gradient method called ANITA for solving the fundamental finite-sum optimization problems. Concretely, we consider both general convex and strongly convex settings: i) For general convex finite-sum problems, ANITA improves previous state-of-the-art result given by Varag (Lan et al., 2019). In particular, for large-scale problems or the convergence error is not very small, i.e., $n \geq \frac{1}{ε^2}$, ANITA obtains the \emph{first} optimal result $O(n)$, matching the lower bound $Ω(n)$ provided by Woodworth and Srebro (2016), while previous results…
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 opposed to O(1/T^2) of accelerated batch algorithms, where $T$ is the number of iterations. Thus, there still remains a gap in convergence rates between existing stochastic ADMM and batch algorithms. To bridge this gap, we introduce the momentum acceleration trick for batch optimiza…
Techniques for reducing the variance of gradient estimates used in stochastic programming algorithms for convex finite-sum problems have received a great deal of attention in recent years. By leveraging dissipativity theory from control, we provide a new perspective on two important variance-reduction algorithms: SVRG and its direct accelerated variant Katyusha. Our perspective provides a physically intuitive understanding of the behavior of SVRG-like methods via a principle of energy conservation. The tools discussed here allow us to automate the convergence analysis of SVRG-like methods by c…
In this paper, we propose a simple acceleration scheme for Riemannian gradient methods by extrapolating iterates on manifolds. We show when the iterates are generated from Riemannian gradient descent method, the accelerated scheme achieves the optimal convergence rate asymptotically and is computationally more favorable than the recently proposed Riemannian Nesterov accelerated gradient methods. Our experiments verify the practical benefit of the novel acceleration strategy.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）
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 convergence rates but have complex coupling structures, which makes them hard to be extended to more settings (e.g., sparse and asynchronous) due to the existence of perturbation. In this paper, we introduce a simple stochastic variance reduced algorithm (MiG), which enjoys the best-…
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 stochastic optimization methods as procedures that iteratively minimize a surrogate of the objective, which covers the stochastic gradient descent method and variants of the incremental approaches SAGA, SVRG, and MISO/Finito/SDCA. This point of view has several advantages: (i) we provide a simple generic proof of convergence for all of the aforementioned methods; (ii…
Rutgers Business School（罗格斯商学院）；Florida State University（佛罗里达州立大学）
Momentum methods such as Polyak's heavy ball (HB) method, Nesterov's accelerated gradient (AG) as well as accelerated projected gradient (APG) method have been commonly used in machine learning practice, but their performance is quite sensitive to noise in the gradients. We study these methods under a first-order stochastic oracle model where noisy estimates of the gradients are available. For strongly convex problems, we show that the distribution of the iterates of AG converges with the accelerated $O(\sqrtκ\log(1/\varepsilon))$ linear rate to a ball of radius $\varepsilon$ centered at a uni…
Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
We study the problem of minimizing a strongly convex, smooth function when we have noisy estimates of its gradient. We propose a novel multistage accelerated algorithm that is universally optimal in the sense that it achieves the optimal rate both in the deterministic and stochastic case and operates without knowledge of noise characteristics. The algorithm consists of stages that use a stochastic version of Nesterov's method with a specific restart and parameters selected to achieve the fastest reduction in the bias-variance terms in the convergence rate bounds.
Exploiting partial first-order information in a cyclic way is arguably the most natural strategy to obtain scalable first-order methods. However, despite their wide use in practice, cyclic schemes are far less understood from a theoretical perspective than their randomized counterparts. Motivated by a recent success in analyzing an extrapolated cyclic scheme for generalized variational inequalities, we propose an Accelerated Cyclic Coordinate Dual Averaging with Extrapolation (A-CODER) method for composite convex optimization, where the objective function can be expressed as the sum of a smoot…
In this paper, we study the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method for the nonconvex nonsmooth optimization, and propose an accelerated SGD method by combining the variance reduction technique with Nesterov's extrapolation technique. Moreover, based on the local error bound condition, we establish the linear convergence of our method to obtain a stationary point of the nonconvex optimization. In particular, we prove that not only the sequence generated linearly converges to a stationary point of the problem, but also the corresponding sequence of objective values is linearly convergent. Fina…
We show that standard extragradient methods (i.e. mirror prox and dual extrapolation) recover optimal accelerated rates for first-order minimization of smooth convex functions. To obtain this result we provide a fine-grained characterization of the convergence rates of extragradient methods for solving monotone variational inequalities in terms of a natural condition we call relative Lipschitzness. We further generalize this framework to handle local and randomized notions of relative Lipschitzness and thereby recover rates for box-constrained $\ell_\infty$ regression based on area convexity a…
We propose an optimization method for minimizing the finite sums of smooth convex functions. Our method incorporates an accelerated gradient descent (AGD) and a stochastic variance reduction gradient (SVRG) in a mini-batch setting. Unlike SVRG, our method can be directly applied to non-strongly and strongly convex problems. We show that our method achieves a lower overall complexity than the recently proposed methods that supports non-strongly convex problems. Moreover, this method has a fast rate of convergence for strongly convex problems. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our method…
In this paper, we propose a novel accelerated stochastic gradient method with momentum, which momentum is the weighted average of previous gradients. The weights decays inverse proportionally with the iteration times. Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (Sgdm) use weights that decays exponentially with the iteration times to generate an momentum term. Using exponentially decaying weights, variants of Sgdm with well designed and complicated formats have been proposed to achieve better performance. The momentum update rules of our method is as simple as that of Sgdm. We provide theoretical…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Ahold Delhaize（阿霍德德尔海兹）
Counterfactual Learning to Rank (LTR) algorithms learn a ranking model from logged user interactions, often collected using a production system. Employing such an offline learning approach has many benefits compared to an online one, but it is challenging as user feedback often contains high levels of bias. Unbiased LTR uses Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) to enable unbiased learning from logged user interactions. One of the major difficulties in applying Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) approaches to counterfactual learning problems is the large variance introduced by the propensity weights…
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University（纽约大学库朗数学科学研究所）
When solving finite-sum minimization problems, two common alternatives to stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with theoretical benefits are random reshuffling (SGD-RR) and shuffle-once (SGD-SO), in which functions are sampled in cycles without replacement. Under a convenient stochastic noise approximation which holds experimentally, we study the stationary variances of the iterates of SGD, SGD-RR and SGD-SO, whose leading terms decrease in this order, and obtain simple approximations. To obtain our results, we study the power spectral density of the stochastic gradient noise sequences. Our analy…
This paper studies decentralized convex-concave minimax optimization problems of the form $\min_x\max_y f(x,y) \triangleq\frac{1}{m}\sum_{i=1}^m f_i(x,y)$, where $m$ is the number of agents and each local function can be written as $f_i(x,y)=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{j=1}^n f_{i,j}(x,y)$. We propose a novel decentralized optimization algorithm, called multi-consensus stochastic variance reduced extragradient, which achieves the best known stochastic first-order oracle (SFO) complexity for this problem. Specifically, each agent requires $\mathcal O((n+κ\sqrt{n})\log(1/\varepsilon))$ SFO calls for strong…
We consider the nonsmooth convex composition optimization problem where the objective is a composition of two finite-sum functions and analyze stochastic compositional variance reduced gradient (SCVRG) methods for them. SCVRG and its variants have recently drawn much attention given their edge over stochastic compositional gradient descent (SCGD); but the theoretical analysis exclusively assumes strong convexity of the objective, which excludes several important examples such as Lasso, logistic regression, principle component analysis and deep neural nets. In contrast, we prove non-asymptotic …
We introduce a framework for designing primal methods under the decentralized optimization setting where local functions are smooth and strongly convex. Our approach consists of approximately solving a sequence of sub-problems induced by the accelerated augmented Lagrangian method, thereby providing a systematic way for deriving several well-known decentralized algorithms including EXTRA arXiv:1404.6264 and SSDA arXiv:1702.08704. When coupled with accelerated gradient descent, our framework yields a novel primal algorithm whose convergence rate is optimal and matched by recently derived lower …
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 descent method, variants of the approaches SAGA, SVRG, and has several advantages: (i) we provide a generic proof of convergence for the aforementioned methods; (ii) we show that this SVRG variant is adaptive to strong convexity; (iii) we naturally obtain new algorithms with the same guarantees; (iv) we derive generic strategies to make these algorithms robust to…
Stochastic variance reduced extragradient methods for solving hierarchical variational inequalities
Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics（魏尔斯特拉斯应用分析与随机学研究所）；Mannheim University（曼海姆大学）；Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original SVRG, called variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Unlike the choices of snapshot and starting points in SVRG and its proximal variant, Prox-SVRG, the two vectors of VR-SGD are set to the average and last iterate of the previous epoch, respectively. The settings allow us to use much larger learning rates, and also make our convergence analysis more challenging. We also design two different update rules for smooth and non-smooth objective functions, respectively, which means that VR-SGD can tackle non-smooth and/or non-…
Zeroth-order (derivative-free) optimization attracts a lot of attention in machine learning, because explicit gradient calculations may be computationally expensive or infeasible. To handle large scale problems both in volume and dimension, recently asynchronous doubly stochastic zeroth-order algorithms were proposed. The convergence rate of existing asynchronous doubly stochastic zeroth order algorithms is $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{T}})$ (also for the sequential stochastic zeroth-order optimization algorithms). In this paper, we focus on the finite sums of smooth but not necessarily convex functions,…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the convergence behavior of these methods under the mean-variance framework, and also provide a theoretical analysis about the inclusion of momentum in stochastic settings which reveals that the momentum term we used adds a deviation of order $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ but controls the variance at the order $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ for the $k$th iteration. So it is shown that,…
Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎-萨克雷大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CEA（法国原子能与替代能源委员会）；University of Genova（热那亚大学）
Acceleration of first order methods is mainly obtained via inertial techniques à la Nesterov, or via nonlinear extrapolation. The latter has known a recent surge of interest, with successful applications to gradient and proximal gradient techniques. On multiple Machine Learning problems, coordinate descent achieves performance significantly superior to full-gradient methods. Speeding up coordinate descent in practice is not easy: inertially accelerated versions of coordinate descent are theoretically accelerated, but might not always lead to practical speed-ups. We propose an accelerated versi…
Asynchronous parallel implementations for stochastic optimization have received huge successes in theory and practice recently. Asynchronous implementations with lock-free are more efficient than the one with writing or reading lock. In this paper, we focus on a composite objective function consisting of a smooth convex function $f$ and a block separable convex function, which widely exists in machine learning and computer vision. We propose an asynchronous stochastic block coordinate descent algorithm with the accelerated technology of variance reduction (AsySBCDVR), which are with lock-free …
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM Watson人工智能实验室）；IBM Research（IBM研究）；Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory（劳伦斯利弗莫尔国家实验室）；University of Michigan, Ann Arbor（密歇根大学安娜堡分校）
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 novel variance reduced ZO algorithm, called ZO-SVRG, and c) an experimental evaluation of our approach in the context of two compelling applications, black-box chemical material classification and generation of adversarial examples from black-box deep neural network models. Our theor…
We consider sum-type strongly convex optimization problem (first term) with smooth convex not proximal friendly composite (second term). We show that the complexity of this problem can be split into optimal number of incremental oracle calls for the first (sum-type) term and optimal number of oracle calls for the second (composite) term. Here under `optimal number' we mean estimate that corresponds to the well known lower bound in the absence of another term.
Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology（南京信息工程大学）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；JD Finance America Corporation（京东金融美国公司）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
The conditional gradient algorithm (also known as the Frank-Wolfe algorithm) has recently regained popularity in the machine learning community due to its projection-free property to solve constrained problems. Although many variants of the conditional gradient algorithm have been proposed to improve performance, they depend on first-order information (gradient) to optimize. Naturally, these algorithms are unable to function properly in the field of increasingly popular zeroth-order optimization, where only zeroth-order information (function value) is available. To fill in this gap, we propose…
In this paper, we propose a variance-reduced primal-dual algorithm with Bregman distance for solving convex-concave saddle-point problems with finite-sum structure and nonbilinear coupling function. This type of problems typically arises in machine learning and game theory. Based on some standard assumptions, the algorithm is proved to converge with oracle complexity of $O\left(\frac{\sqrt n}ε\right)$ and $O\left(\frac{n}{\sqrt ε}+\frac{1}{ε^{1.5}}\right)$ using constant and non-constant parameters, respectively where $n$ is the number of function components. Compared with existing methods, ou…
In this work we explore the fundamental structure-adaptiveness of state of the art randomized first order algorithms on regularized empirical risk minimization tasks, where the solution has intrinsic low-dimensional structure (such as sparsity and low-rank). Such structure is often enforced by non-smooth regularization or constraints. We start by establishing the fast linear convergence rate of the SAGA algorithm on non-strongly-convex objectives with convex constraints, via an argument of cone-restricted strong convexity. Then for the composite minimization task with a coordinate-wise separab…
Accelerated Stochastic ADMM with Variance Reduction
Computer Science Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机学院）；Department of Respiratory Diseases, The First Affiliated Hospital, College of Medicine Zhejiang University（浙江大学医学院附属第一医院呼吸科）
Variance reduction is a crucial tool for improving the slow convergence of stochastic gradient descent. Only a few variance-reduced methods, however, have yet been shown to directly benefit from Nesterov's acceleration techniques to match the convergence rates of accelerated gradient methods. Such approaches rely on "negative momentum", a technique for further variance reduction that is generally specific to the SVRG gradient estimator. In this work, we show that negative momentum is unnecessary for acceleration and develop a universal acceleration framework that allows all popular variance-re…
We study structured nonsmooth convex finite-sum optimization that appears widely in machine learning applications, including support vector machines and least absolute deviation. For the primal-dual formulation of this problem, we propose a novel algorithm called \emph{Variance Reduction via Primal-Dual Accelerated Dual Averaging (\vrpda)}. In the nonsmooth and general convex setting, \vrpda~has the overall complexity $O(nd\log\min \{1/ε, n\} + d/ε)$ in terms of the primal-dual gap, where $n$ denotes the number of samples, $d$ the dimension of the primal variables, and $ε$ the desired accuracy…
This work proposes a universal and adaptive second-order method for minimizing second-order smooth, convex functions. Our algorithm achieves $O(σ/ \sqrt{T})$ convergence when the oracle feedback is stochastic with variance $σ^2$, and improves its convergence to $O( 1 / T^3)$ with deterministic oracles, where $T$ is the number of iterations. Our method also interpolates these rates without knowing the nature of the oracle apriori, which is enabled by a parameter-free adaptive step-size that is oblivious to the knowledge of smoothness modulus, variance bounds and the diameter of the constrained …
This paper describes a novel algorithmic framework to minimize a finite-sum of functions available over a network of nodes. The proposed framework, that we call~\GTVR, is stochastic and decentralized, and thus is particularly suitable for problems where large-scale, potentially private data, cannot be collected or processed at a centralized server. The \GTVR~framework leads to a family of algorithms with two key ingredients: (i) \textit{local variance reduction}, that enables estimating the local batch gradients from arbitrarily drawn samples of local data; and, (ii) \textit{global gradient tr…
We consider convex-concave saddle-point problems where the objective functions may be split in many components, and extend recent stochastic variance reduction methods (such as SVRG or SAGA) to provide the first large-scale linearly convergent algorithms for this class of problems which is common in machine learning. While the algorithmic extension is straightforward, it comes with challenges and opportunities: (a) the convex minimization analysis does not apply and we use the notion of monotone operators to prove convergence, showing in particular that the same algorithm applies to a larger c…
College of Computer Science & Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学计算机科学与技术学院）；MIIT Key Laboratory of Pattern Analysis & Machine Intelligence（工信部模式分析与机器智能重点实验室）
In the paper, we propose a class of accelerated stochastic gradient-free and projection-free (a.k.a., zeroth-order Frank-Wolfe) methods to solve the constrained stochastic and finite-sum nonconvex optimization. Specifically, we propose an accelerated stochastic zeroth-order Frank-Wolfe (Acc-SZOFW) method based on the variance reduced technique of SPIDER/SpiderBoost and a novel momentum accelerated technique. Moreover, under some mild conditions, we prove that the Acc-SZOFW has the function query complexity of $O(d\sqrt{n}ε^{-2})$ for finding an $ε$-stationary point in the finite-sum problem, w…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Rutgers Business School（罗格斯商学院）；INRIA - Département d’Informatique de l’École Normale Supérieure（法国国家信息与自动化研究所 - 巴黎高等师范学院信息学系）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；Florida State University（佛罗里达州立大学）
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 units, lying on a fixed but arbitrary connected communication graph, subject to local communication constraints where noisy estimates of the gradients are available. We develop a framework which allows to choose the stepsize and the momentum parameters of these algorithms in a way to optimize performance by systematically trading off the bias, variance, robustn…
We study the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation and present efficient and practical algorithms that come with strong optimality guarantees. We begin by proving lower bounds that establish baselines on both the deterministic error and stochastic error in this problem. In particular, we prove an oracle complexity lower bound on the deterministic error in an instance-dependent norm associated with the stationary distribution of the transition kernel, and use the local asymptotic minimax machinery to prove an instance-dependent lower bound on the stochastic error in th…
