18,928 research outputs found
Optimization Methods for Inverse Problems
Optimization plays an important role in solving many inverse problems.
Indeed, the task of inversion often either involves or is fully cast as a
solution of an optimization problem. In this light, the mere non-linear,
non-convex, and large-scale nature of many of these inversions gives rise to
some very challenging optimization problems. The inverse problem community has
long been developing various techniques for solving such optimization tasks.
However, other, seemingly disjoint communities, such as that of machine
learning, have developed, almost in parallel, interesting alternative methods
which might have stayed under the radar of the inverse problem community. In
this survey, we aim to change that. In doing so, we first discuss current
state-of-the-art optimization methods widely used in inverse problems. We then
survey recent related advances in addressing similar challenges in problems
faced by the machine learning community, and discuss their potential advantages
for solving inverse problems. By highlighting the similarities among the
optimization challenges faced by the inverse problem and the machine learning
communities, we hope that this survey can serve as a bridge in bringing
together these two communities and encourage cross fertilization of ideas.Comment: 13 page
Hybrid Deterministic-Stochastic Methods for Data Fitting
Many structured data-fitting applications require the solution of an
optimization problem involving a sum over a potentially large number of
measurements. Incremental gradient algorithms offer inexpensive iterations by
sampling a subset of the terms in the sum. These methods can make great
progress initially, but often slow as they approach a solution. In contrast,
full-gradient methods achieve steady convergence at the expense of evaluating
the full objective and gradient on each iteration. We explore hybrid methods
that exhibit the benefits of both approaches. Rate-of-convergence analysis
shows that by controlling the sample size in an incremental gradient algorithm,
it is possible to maintain the steady convergence rates of full-gradient
methods. We detail a practical quasi-Newton implementation based on this
approach. Numerical experiments illustrate its potential benefits.Comment: 26 pages. Revised proofs of Theorems 2.6 and 3.1, results unchange
Second-Order Optimization for Non-Convex Machine Learning: An Empirical Study
While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent
(SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known
deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the
settings of hyper-parameters such as learning rate, stagnation at high training
errors, and difficulty in escaping flat regions and saddle points. These issues
are particularly acute in highly non-convex settings such as those arising in
neural networks. Motivated by this, there has been recent interest in
second-order methods that aim to alleviate these shortcomings by capturing
curvature information. In this paper, we report detailed empirical evaluations
of a class of Newton-type methods, namely sub-sampled variants of trust region
(TR) and adaptive regularization with cubics (ARC) algorithms, for non-convex
ML problems. In doing so, we demonstrate that these methods not only can be
computationally competitive with hand-tuned SGD with momentum, obtaining
comparable or better generalization performance, but also they are highly
robust to hyper-parameter settings. Further, in contrast to SGD with momentum,
we show that the manner in which these Newton-type methods employ curvature
information allows them to seamlessly escape flat regions and saddle points.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures. Restructure the paper and add experiment
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