ICML 2018oral51 citations

Local Convergence Properties of SAGA/Prox-SVRG and Acceleration

Clarice Poon, Jingwei Liang, Carola Schoenlieb

Abstract

In this paper, we present a local convergence anal- ysis for a class of stochastic optimisation meth- ods: the proximal variance reduced stochastic gradient methods, and mainly focus on SAGA (Defazio et al., 2014) and Prox-SVRG (Xiao & Zhang, 2014). Under the assumption that the non-smooth component of the optimisation prob- lem is partly smooth relative to a smooth mani- fold, we present a unified framework for the local convergence analysis of SAGA/Prox-SVRG: (i) the sequences generated by the methods are able to identify the smooth manifold in a finite num- ber of iterations; (ii) then the sequence enters a local linear convergence regime. Furthermore, we discuss various possibilities for accelerating these algorithms, including adapting to better lo- cal parameters, and applying higher-order deter- ministic/stochastic optimisation methods which can achieve super-linear convergence. Several concrete examples arising from machine learning are considered to demonstrate the obtained result.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v80-poon18a,
  title = 	 {Local Convergence Properties of {SAGA}/{P}rox-{SVRG} and Acceleration},
  author =       {Poon, Clarice and Liang, Jingwei and Schoenlieb, Carola},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = 	 {4124--4132},
  year = 	 {2018},
  editor = 	 {Dy, Jennifer and Krause, Andreas},
  volume = 	 {80},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {10--15 Jul},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/poon18a/poon18a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/poon18a.html},
  abstract = 	 {In this paper, we present a local convergence anal- ysis for a class of stochastic optimisation meth- ods: the proximal variance reduced stochastic gradient methods, and mainly focus on SAGA (Defazio et al., 2014) and Prox-SVRG (Xiao & Zhang, 2014). Under the assumption that the non-smooth component of the optimisation prob- lem is partly smooth relative to a smooth mani- fold, we present a unified framework for the local convergence analysis of SAGA/Prox-SVRG: (i) the sequences generated by the methods are able to identify the smooth manifold in a finite num- ber of iterations; (ii) then the sequence enters a local linear convergence regime. Furthermore, we discuss various possibilities for accelerating these algorithms, including adapting to better lo- cal parameters, and applying higher-order deter- ministic/stochastic optimisation methods which can achieve super-linear convergence. Several concrete examples arising from machine learning are considered to demonstrate the obtained result.}
}