1,715 research outputs found
An optimal subgradient algorithm for large-scale convex optimization in simple domains
This paper shows that the optimal subgradient algorithm, OSGA, proposed in
\cite{NeuO} can be used for solving structured large-scale convex constrained
optimization problems. Only first-order information is required, and the
optimal complexity bounds for both smooth and nonsmooth problems are attained.
More specifically, we consider two classes of problems: (i) a convex objective
with a simple closed convex domain, where the orthogonal projection on this
feasible domain is efficiently available; (ii) a convex objective with a simple
convex functional constraint. If we equip OSGA with an appropriate
prox-function, the OSGA subproblem can be solved either in a closed form or by
a simple iterative scheme, which is especially important for large-scale
problems. We report numerical results for some applications to show the
efficiency of the proposed scheme. A software package implementing OSGA for
above domains is available
Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe Optimization for Structural SVMs
We propose a randomized block-coordinate variant of the classic Frank-Wolfe
algorithm for convex optimization with block-separable constraints. Despite its
lower iteration cost, we show that it achieves a similar convergence rate in
duality gap as the full Frank-Wolfe algorithm. We also show that, when applied
to the dual structural support vector machine (SVM) objective, this yields an
online algorithm that has the same low iteration complexity as primal
stochastic subgradient methods. However, unlike stochastic subgradient methods,
the block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe algorithm allows us to compute the optimal
step-size and yields a computable duality gap guarantee. Our experiments
indicate that this simple algorithm outperforms competing structural SVM
solvers.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML 2013). 9 pages main text + 22 pages appendix. Changes
from v3 to v4: 1) Re-organized appendix; improved & clarified duality gap
proofs; re-drew all plots; 2) Changed convention for Cf definition; 3) Added
weighted averaging experiments + convergence results; 4) Clarified main text
and relationship with appendi
Training Deep Networks without Learning Rates Through Coin Betting
Deep learning methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in many application scenarios. Yet, these methods require a significant amount of hyperparameters tuning in order to achieve the best results. In particular, tuning the learning rates in the stochastic optimization process is still one of the main bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a new stochastic gradient descent procedure for deep networks that does not require any learning rate setting. Contrary to previous methods, we do not adapt the learning rates nor we make use of the assumed curvature of the objective function. Instead, we reduce the optimization process to a game of betting on a coin and propose a learning rate free optimal algorithm for this scenario. Theoretical convergence is proven for convex and quasi-convex functions and empirical evidence shows the advantage of our algorithm over popular stochastic gradient algorithms
Convex optimization over intersection of simple sets: improved convergence rate guarantees via an exact penalty approach
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function over the intersection
of finitely many simple sets which are easy to project onto. This is an
important problem arising in various domains such as machine learning. The main
difficulty lies in finding the projection of a point in the intersection of
many sets. Existing approaches yield an infeasible point with an
iteration-complexity of for nonsmooth problems with no
guarantees on the in-feasibility. By reformulating the problem through exact
penalty functions, we derive first-order algorithms which not only guarantees
that the distance to the intersection is small but also improve the complexity
to and for smooth functions. For
composite and smooth problems, this is achieved through a saddle-point
reformulation where the proximal operators required by the primal-dual
algorithms can be computed in closed form. We illustrate the benefits of our
approach on a graph transduction problem and on graph matching
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