Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Traoré, Cheik, Apidopoulos, Vassilis, Salzo, Saverio, Villa, Silvia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09310
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916347639758848
author Traoré, Cheik
Apidopoulos, Vassilis
Salzo, Saverio
Villa, Silvia
author_facet Traoré, Cheik
Apidopoulos, Vassilis
Salzo, Saverio
Villa, Silvia
contents In the context of finite sums minimization, variance reduction techniques are widely used to improve the performance of state-of-the-art stochastic gradient methods. Their practical impact is clear, as well as their theoretical properties. Stochastic proximal point algorithms have been studied as an alternative to stochastic gradient algorithms since they are more stable with respect to the choice of the step size. However, their variance-reduced versions are not as well studied as the gradient ones. In this work, we propose the first unified study of variance reduction techniques for stochastic proximal point algorithms. We introduce a generic stochastic proximal-based algorithm that can be specified to give the proximal version of SVRG, SAGA, and some of their variants. For this algorithm, in the smooth setting, we provide several convergence rates for the iterates and the objective function values, which are faster than those of the vanilla stochastic proximal point algorithm. More specifically, for convex functions, we prove a sublinear convergence rate of $O(1/k)$. In addition, under the Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PL) condition, we obtain linear convergence rates. Finally, our numerical experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proximal variance reduction methods over their gradient counterparts in terms of the stability with respect to the choice of the step size in most cases, especially for difficult problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_09310
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Variance reduction techniques for stochastic proximal point algorithms
Traoré, Cheik
Apidopoulos, Vassilis
Salzo, Saverio
Villa, Silvia
Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
In the context of finite sums minimization, variance reduction techniques are widely used to improve the performance of state-of-the-art stochastic gradient methods. Their practical impact is clear, as well as their theoretical properties. Stochastic proximal point algorithms have been studied as an alternative to stochastic gradient algorithms since they are more stable with respect to the choice of the step size. However, their variance-reduced versions are not as well studied as the gradient ones. In this work, we propose the first unified study of variance reduction techniques for stochastic proximal point algorithms. We introduce a generic stochastic proximal-based algorithm that can be specified to give the proximal version of SVRG, SAGA, and some of their variants. For this algorithm, in the smooth setting, we provide several convergence rates for the iterates and the objective function values, which are faster than those of the vanilla stochastic proximal point algorithm. More specifically, for convex functions, we prove a sublinear convergence rate of $O(1/k)$. In addition, under the Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PL) condition, we obtain linear convergence rates. Finally, our numerical experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proximal variance reduction methods over their gradient counterparts in terms of the stability with respect to the choice of the step size in most cases, especially for difficult problems.
title Variance reduction techniques for stochastic proximal point algorithms
topic Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09310