Biased Stochastic First-Order Methods for Conditional Stochastic Optimization and Applications in Meta Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hu, Yifan, Zhang, Siqi, Chen, Xin, He, Niao
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2020
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author Hu, Yifan
Zhang, Siqi
Chen, Xin
He, Niao
author_facet Hu, Yifan
Zhang, Siqi
Chen, Xin
He, Niao
contents Conditional stochastic optimization covers a variety of applications ranging from invariant learning and causal inference to meta-learning. However, constructing unbiased gradient estimators for such problems is challenging due to the composition structure. As an alternative, we propose a biased stochastic gradient descent (BSGD) algorithm and study the bias-variance tradeoff under different structural assumptions. We establish the sample complexities of BSGD for strongly convex, convex, and weakly convex objectives under smooth and non-smooth conditions. Our lower bound analysis shows that the sample complexities of BSGD cannot be improved for general convex objectives and nonconvex objectives except for smooth nonconvex objectives with Lipschitz continuous gradient estimator. For this special setting, we propose an accelerated algorithm called biased SpiderBoost (BSpiderBoost) that matches the lower bound complexity. We further conduct numerical experiments on invariant logistic regression and model-agnostic meta-learning to illustrate the performance of BSGD and BSpiderBoost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2002_10790
institution arXiv
publishDate 2020
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Biased Stochastic First-Order Methods for Conditional Stochastic Optimization and Applications in Meta Learning
Hu, Yifan
Zhang, Siqi
Chen, Xin
He, Niao
Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
Conditional stochastic optimization covers a variety of applications ranging from invariant learning and causal inference to meta-learning. However, constructing unbiased gradient estimators for such problems is challenging due to the composition structure. As an alternative, we propose a biased stochastic gradient descent (BSGD) algorithm and study the bias-variance tradeoff under different structural assumptions. We establish the sample complexities of BSGD for strongly convex, convex, and weakly convex objectives under smooth and non-smooth conditions. Our lower bound analysis shows that the sample complexities of BSGD cannot be improved for general convex objectives and nonconvex objectives except for smooth nonconvex objectives with Lipschitz continuous gradient estimator. For this special setting, we propose an accelerated algorithm called biased SpiderBoost (BSpiderBoost) that matches the lower bound complexity. We further conduct numerical experiments on invariant logistic regression and model-agnostic meta-learning to illustrate the performance of BSGD and BSpiderBoost.
title Biased Stochastic First-Order Methods for Conditional Stochastic Optimization and Applications in Meta Learning
topic Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.10790