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Poster
Optimal Regularized Dual Averaging Methods for Stochastic Optimization
Xi Chen · Qihang Lin · Javier Pena

Tue Dec 04 07:00 PM -- 12:00 AM (PST) @ Harrah’s Special Events Center 2nd Floor
in Poster Session »
This paper considers a wide spectrum of regularized stochastic optimization problems where both the loss function and regularizer can be non-smooth. We develop a novel algorithm based on the regularized dual averaging (RDA) method, that can simultaneously achieve the optimal convergence rates for both convex and strongly convex loss. In particular, for strongly convex loss, it achieves the optimal rate of $O(\frac{1}{N}+\frac{1}{N^2})$ for $N$ iterations, which improves the best known rate $O(\frac{\log N }{N})$ of previous stochastic dual averaging algorithms. In addition, our method constructs the final solution directly from the proximal mapping instead of averaging of all previous iterates. For widely used sparsity-inducing regularizers (e.g., $\ell_1$-norm), it has the advantage of encouraging sparser solutions. We further develop a multi-stage extension using the proposed algorithm as a subroutine, which achieves the uniformly-optimal rate $O(\frac{1}{N}+\exp\{-N\})$ for strongly convex loss.
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Author Information

Xi Chen (NYU)

Xi Chen is an associate professor with tenure at Stern School of Business at New York University, who is also an affiliated professor to Computer Science and Center for Data Science. Before that, he was a Postdoc in the group of Prof. Michael Jordan at UC Berkeley. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). He studies high-dimensional statistical learning, online learning, large-scale stochastic optimization, and applications to operations. He has published more than 20 journal articles in statistics, machine learning, and operations, and 30 top machine learning peer-reviewed conference proceedings. He received NSF Career Award, ICSA Outstanding Young Researcher Award, Faculty Research Awards from Google, Adobe, Alibaba, and Bloomberg, and was featured in Forbes list of “30 Under30 in Science”.

Qihang Lin (University of Iowa)
Javier Pena (Carnegie Mellon University)

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