Stochastic Optimization with Variance Reduction for Infinite Datasets with Finite-Sum Structure

Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for example by data augmentation. In such cases, the objective is no longer a finite sum, and the main candidate for optimization is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). In this paper, we introduce a variance reduction approach for these settings when the objective is composite and strongly convex. The convergence rate outperforms SGD with a typically much smaller constant factor, which depends on the variance of gradient estimates only due to perturbations on a single example.Comment: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Dec 2017, Long Beach, CA, United State

Cyclic Block Coordinate Descent With Variance Reduction for Composite Nonconvex Optimization

Nonconvex optimization is central in solving many machine learning problems, in which block-wise structure is commonly encountered. In this work, we propose cyclic block coordinate methods for nonconvex optimization problems with non-asymptotic gradient norm guarantees. Our convergence analysis is based on a gradient Lipschitz condition with respect to a Mahalanobis norm, inspired by a recent progress on cyclic block coordinate methods. In deterministic settings, our convergence guarantee matches the guarantee of (full-gradient) gradient descent, but with the gradient Lipschitz constant being defined w.r.t.~the Mahalanobis norm. In stochastic settings, we use recursive variance reduction to decrease the per-iteration cost and match the arithmetic operation complexity of current optimal stochastic full-gradient methods, with a unified analysis for both finite-sum and infinite-sum cases. We further prove the faster, linear convergence of our methods when a Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (P{\L}) condition holds for the objective function. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to provide variance-reduced convergence guarantees for a cyclic block coordinate method. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed variance-reduced cyclic scheme in training deep neural nets