Stochastic Majorization-Minimization Algorithms for Large-Scale Optimization

Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal processing. In this paper, we intend to make this principle scalable. We introduce a stochastic majorization-minimization scheme which is able to deal with large-scale or possibly infinite data sets. When applied to convex optimization problems under suitable assumptions, we show that it achieves an expected convergence rate of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ after $n$ iterations, and of $O(1/n)$ for strongly convex functions. Equally important, our scheme almost surely converges to stationary points for a large class of non-convex problems. We develop several efficient algorithms based on our framework. First, we propose a new stochastic proximal gradient method, which experimentally matches state-of-the-art solvers for large-scale $\ell_1$-logistic regression. Second, we develop an online DC programming algorithm for non-convex sparse estimation. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for solving large-scale structured matrix factorization problems.Comment: accepted for publication for Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2013. This is the 9-pages version followed by 16 pages of appendices. The title has changed compared to the first technical repor

Catalyst Acceleration for Gradient-Based Non-Convex Optimization

We introduce a generic scheme to solve nonconvex optimization problems using gradient-based algorithms originally designed for minimizing convex functions. Even though these methods may originally require convexity to operate, the proposed approach allows one to use them on weakly convex objectives, which covers a large class of non-convex functions typically appearing in machine learning and signal processing. In general, the scheme is guaranteed to produce a stationary point with a worst-case efficiency typical of first-order methods, and when the objective turns out to be convex, it automatically accelerates in the sense of Nesterov and achieves near-optimal convergence rate in function values. These properties are achieved without assuming any knowledge about the convexity of the objective, by automatically adapting to the unknown weak convexity constant. We conclude the paper by showing promising experimental results obtained by applying our approach to incremental algorithms such as SVRG and SAGA for sparse matrix factorization and for learning neural networks