Title
Page: A Simple And Optimal Probabilistic Gradient Estimator For Nonconvex Optimization
Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel stochastic gradient estimator-ProbAbilistic Gradient Estimator (PAGE)-for nonconvex optimization. PAGE is easy to implement as it is designed via a small adjustment to vanilla SGD: in each iteration, PAGE uses the vanilla minibatch SGD update with probability p t or reuses the previous gradient with a small adjustment, at a much lower computational cost, with probability 1 - p(t). We give a simple formula for the optimal choice of p(t). Moreover, we prove the first tight lower bound Omega (n + root n/epsilon(2)), for non-convex finite-sum problems, which also leads to a tight lower bound Omega (b + root b/epsilon(2)) for non- convex online problems, where b := min{sigma(2)/epsilon(2), n} . Then, we show that PAGE obtains the optimal convergence results O(n + root n/epsilon(2)) (finite-sum) and O(b + root b/is an element of(2)) (online) matching our lower bounds for both nonconvex finite-sum and online problems. Besides, we also show that for nonconvex functions satisfying the Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) condition, PAGE can automatically switch to a faster linear convergence rate O(. log 1/epsilon). Finally, we conduct several deep learning experiments (e.g., LeNet, VGG, ResNet) on real datasets in PyTorch showing that PAGE not only converges much faster than SGD in training but also achieves the higher test accuracy, validating the optimal theoretical results and confirming the practical superiority of PAGE.
Year
Venue
DocType
2021
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MACHINE LEARNING, VOL 139
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
139
2640-3498
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhize Li1196.56
Hongyan Bao261.48
Xiangliang Zhang372887.74
Peter Richtárik4525.66