Universal Stagewise Learning for Non-Convex Problems with Convergence on Averaged Solutions
Although stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants (e.g., stochastic momentum methods, AdaGrad) are the choice of algorithms for solving non-convex problems (especially deep learning), there still remain big gaps between the theory and the practice with many questions unresolved. For example, there is still a lack of theories of convergence for SGD and its variants that use stagewise step size and return an averaged solution in practice. In addition, theoretical insights of why adaptive step size of AdaGrad could improve non-adaptive step size of {\sgd} is still missing for non-convex optimization. This paper aims to address these questions and fill the gap between theory and practice. We propose a universal stagewise optimization framework for a broad family of {\bf non-smooth non-convex} (namely weakly convex) problems with the following key features: (i) at each stage any suitable stochastic convex optimization algorithms (e.g., SGD or AdaGrad) that return an averaged solution can be employed for minimizing a regularized convex problem; (ii) the step size is decreased in a stagewise manner; (iii) an averaged solution is returned as the final solution that is selected from all stagewise averaged solutions with sampling probabilities {\it increasing} as the stage number. Our theoretical results of stagewise AdaGrad exhibit its adaptive convergence, therefore shed insights on its faster convergence for problems with sparse stochastic gradients than stagewise SGD. To the best of our knowledge, these new results are the first of their kind for addressing the unresolved issues of existing theories mentioned earlier. Besides theoretical contributions, our empirical studies show that our stagewise SGD and ADAGRAD improve the generalization performance of existing variants/implementations of SGD and ADAGRAD.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Methods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
On the Convergence of Memory-Based Distributed SGD
Distributed stochastic gradient descent~(DSGD) has been widely used for optimizing large-scale machine learning models, including both convex and non-convex models. With the rapid growth of model size, huge communication…
Stagewise Training Accelerates Convergence of Testing Error Over SGD
Stagewise training strategy is widely used for learning neural networks, which runs a stochastic algorithm (e.g., SGD) starting with a relatively large step size (aka learning rate) and geometrically decreasing the step …
Last Iterate is Slower than Averaged Iterate in Smooth Convex-Concave Saddle Point Problems
In this paper we study the smooth convex-concave saddle point problem. Specifically, we analyze the last iterate convergence properties of the Extragradient (EG) algorithm. It is well known that the ergodic (averaged) it…
Majorization-Minimization Dual Stagewise Algorithm for Generalized Lasso
The generalized lasso is a natural generalization of the celebrated lasso approach to handle structural regularization problems. Many important methods and applications fall into this framework, including fused lasso, cl…
Computational EfficiencyTransformer-based Stagewise Decomposition for Large-Scale Multistage Stochastic Optimization
Solving large-scale multistage stochastic programming (MSP) problems poses a significant challenge as commonly used stagewise decomposition algorithms, including stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP), face growing t…
Stochastic Optimization