Year: 2016
Type: preprint
Abstract: The Frank-Wolfe optimization algorithm has recently regained popularity for machine learning applications due to its projection-free property and its ability to handle structured constraints. However, in the stochastic learning setting, it is still relatively understudied compared to the gradient descent counterpart. In this work, leveraging a recent variance reduction technique, we propose two stochastic Frank-Wolfe variants which substantially improve previous results in terms of the number of stochastic gradient evaluations needed to achieve $1-ε$ accuracy. For example, we improve from $O(\frac{1}ε)$ to $O(\ln\frac{1}ε)$ if the objective function is smooth and strongly convex, and from $O(\frac{1}{ε^2})$ to $O(\frac{1}{ε^{1.5}})$ if the objective function is smooth and Lipschitz. The theoretical improvement is also observed in experiments on real-world datasets for a multiclass classification application.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Hazan, Elad, Luo, Haipeng
Institution: Princeton University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2257807852