How Free is Parameter-Free Stochastic Optimization?

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Attia, Amit, Koren, Tomer
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Attia, Amit
Koren, Tomer
author_facet Attia, Amit
Koren, Tomer
contents We study the problem of parameter-free stochastic optimization, inquiring whether, and under what conditions, do fully parameter-free methods exist: these are methods that achieve convergence rates competitive with optimally tuned methods, without requiring significant knowledge of the true problem parameters. Existing parameter-free methods can only be considered ``partially'' parameter-free, as they require some non-trivial knowledge of the true problem parameters, such as a bound on the stochastic gradient norms, a bound on the distance to a minimizer, etc. In the non-convex setting, we demonstrate that a simple hyperparameter search technique results in a fully parameter-free method that outperforms more sophisticated state-of-the-art algorithms. We also provide a similar result in the convex setting with access to noisy function values under mild noise assumptions. Finally, assuming only access to stochastic gradients, we establish a lower bound that renders fully parameter-free stochastic convex optimization infeasible, and provide a method which is (partially) parameter-free up to the limit indicated by our lower bound.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03126
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Free is Parameter-Free Stochastic Optimization?
Attia, Amit
Koren, Tomer
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
We study the problem of parameter-free stochastic optimization, inquiring whether, and under what conditions, do fully parameter-free methods exist: these are methods that achieve convergence rates competitive with optimally tuned methods, without requiring significant knowledge of the true problem parameters. Existing parameter-free methods can only be considered ``partially'' parameter-free, as they require some non-trivial knowledge of the true problem parameters, such as a bound on the stochastic gradient norms, a bound on the distance to a minimizer, etc. In the non-convex setting, we demonstrate that a simple hyperparameter search technique results in a fully parameter-free method that outperforms more sophisticated state-of-the-art algorithms. We also provide a similar result in the convex setting with access to noisy function values under mild noise assumptions. Finally, assuming only access to stochastic gradients, we establish a lower bound that renders fully parameter-free stochastic convex optimization infeasible, and provide a method which is (partially) parameter-free up to the limit indicated by our lower bound.
title How Free is Parameter-Free Stochastic Optimization?
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03126