Mediaspace scheduled maintenance: Aug 25, 2026 07:00 - 12:00 AM. During this time, videos will be temporarily unavailable. Check status updates.

Lecture

Stochastic Gradient Descent: Optimization Techniques

In course

EE-556: Mathematics of data: from theory to computation

This course provides an overview of key advances in continuous optimization and statistical analysis for machine learning. We review recent learning formulations and models as well as their guarantees

Description

This lecture covers the transition from stochastic gradient descent to non-smooth optimization, focusing on topics such as sparsity, compressive sensing, and atomic norms. It delves into stochastic programming, synthetic least-squares problems, and the convergence of SGD for strongly convex problems. The instructor explains the importance of step-size selection and averaging techniques to enhance optimization performance.

Instructor

Volkan Cevher

Volkan Cevher received the B.Sc. (valedictorian) in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1999 and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA in 2005. He was a Research Scientist with the University of Maryland, College Park from 2006-2007 and also with Rice University in Houston, TX, from 2008-2009. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and a Faculty Fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. His research interests include machine learning, signal processing theory, optimization theory and methods, and information theory. Dr. Cevher is an ELLIS fellow and was the recipient of the Google Faculty Research award in 2018, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2016, a Best Paper Award at CAMSAP in 2015, a Best Paper Award at SPARS in 2009, and an ERC CG in 2016 as well as an ERC StG in 2011.

Official source

Related concepts (22)

Compressed sensing

Compressed sensing (also known as compressive sensing, compressive sampling, or sparse sampling) is a signal processing technique for efficiently acquiring and reconstructing a signal, by finding solutions to underdetermined linear systems. This is based on the principle that, through optimization, the sparsity of a signal can be exploited to recover it from far fewer samples than required by the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem. There are two conditions under which recovery is possible.

Mathematical optimization

Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled optimisation) or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfields: discrete optimization and continuous optimization. Optimization problems arise in all quantitative disciplines from computer science and engineering to operations research and economics, and the development of solution methods has been of interest in mathematics for centuries.

Stochastic gradient descent

Stochastic gradient descent (often abbreviated SGD) is an iterative method for optimizing an objective function with suitable smoothness properties (e.g. differentiable or subdifferentiable). It can be regarded as a stochastic approximation of gradient descent optimization, since it replaces the actual gradient (calculated from the entire data set) by an estimate thereof (calculated from a randomly selected subset of the data).

Sparse approximation

Sparse approximation (also known as sparse representation) theory deals with sparse solutions for systems of linear equations. Techniques for finding these solutions and exploiting them in applications have found wide use in , signal processing, machine learning, medical imaging, and more. Consider a linear system of equations , where is an underdetermined matrix and . The matrix (typically assumed to be full-rank) is referred to as the dictionary, and is a signal of interest.

Sparse dictionary learning

Sparse dictionary learning (also known as sparse coding or SDL) is a representation learning method which aims at finding a sparse representation of the input data in the form of a linear combination of basic elements as well as those basic elements themselves. These elements are called atoms and they compose a dictionary. Atoms in the dictionary are not required to be orthogonal, and they may be an over-complete spanning set. This problem setup also allows the dimensionality of the signals being represented to be higher than the one of the signals being observed.

Related lectures (26)

From Stochastic Gradient Descent to Non-Smooth Optimization

Covers stochastic optimization, sparsity, and non-smooth minimization via subgradient descent.

Stochastic Gradient Descent: Optimization Techniques

Explores Stochastic Gradient Descent with Averaging, comparing it with Gradient Descent, and discusses challenges in non-convex optimization and sparse recovery techniques.

Optimization Methods in Machine Learning

Explores optimization methods in machine learning, emphasizing gradients, costs, and computational efforts for efficient model training.

Optimality of Convergence Rates: Accelerated/Stochastic Gradient Descent

Covers the optimality of convergence rates in accelerated and stochastic gradient descent methods for non-convex optimization problems.

Stochastic Gradient Descent: Non-convex Optimization Techniques