45,270 research outputs found
Variance-Reduced and Projection-Free Stochastic Optimization
The Frank-Wolfe optimization algorithm has recently regained popularity for
machine learning applications due to its projection-free property and its
ability to handle structured constraints. However, in the stochastic learning
setting, it is still relatively understudied compared to the gradient descent
counterpart. In this work, leveraging a recent variance reduction technique, we
propose two stochastic Frank-Wolfe variants which substantially improve
previous results in terms of the number of stochastic gradient evaluations
needed to achieve accuracy. For example, we improve from
to if the objective function
is smooth and strongly convex, and from to
if the objective function is smooth and
Lipschitz. The theoretical improvement is also observed in experiments on
real-world datasets for a multiclass classification application
Stochastic Frank-Wolfe Methods for Nonconvex Optimization
We study Frank-Wolfe methods for nonconvex stochastic and finite-sum
optimization problems. Frank-Wolfe methods (in the convex case) have gained
tremendous recent interest in machine learning and optimization communities due
to their projection-free property and their ability to exploit structured
constraints. However, our understanding of these algorithms in the nonconvex
setting is fairly limited. In this paper, we propose nonconvex stochastic
Frank-Wolfe methods and analyze their convergence properties. For objective
functions that decompose into a finite-sum, we leverage ideas from variance
reduction techniques for convex optimization to obtain new variance reduced
nonconvex Frank-Wolfe methods that have provably faster convergence than the
classical Frank-Wolfe method. Finally, we show that the faster convergence
rates of our variance reduced methods also translate into improved convergence
rates for the stochastic setting
An Asynchronous Parallel Randomized Kaczmarz Algorithm
We describe an asynchronous parallel variant of the randomized Kaczmarz (RK)
algorithm for solving the linear system . The analysis shows linear
convergence and indicates that nearly linear speedup can be expected if the
number of processors is bounded by a multiple of the number of rows in
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