Stochastic subgradient methods are widely used, well analyzed, and constitute effective tools for optimization and online learning. Stochastic gradient methods ’ popularity and appeal are largely due to their simplicity, as they largely follow predetermined procedural schemes. However, most common subgradient approaches are oblivious to the characteristics of the data being observed. We present a new family of subgradient methods that dynamically incorporate knowledge of the geometry of the data observed in earlier iterations to perform more informative gradient-based learning. The adaptation, in essence, allows us to find needles in haystacks in the form of very predictive but rarely seenfeatures. Ourparadigmstemsfromrecentadvancesinstochasticoptimizationandonlinelearning which employ proximal functions to control the gradient steps of the algorithm. We describe and analyze an apparatus for adaptively modifying the proximal function, which significantly simplifies setting a learning rate and results in regret guarantees that are provably as good as the best proximal function that can be chosen in hindsight. In a companion paper, we validate experimentally our theoretical analysis and show that the adaptive subgradient approach outperforms state-of-the-art, but non-adaptive, subgradient algorithms. 1

We present a new method for regularized convex optimization and analyze it under both online and stochastic optimization settings. In addition to unifying previously known firstorder algorithms, such as the projected gradient method, mirror descent, and forwardbackward splitting, our method yields new analysis and algorithms. We also derive specific instantiations of our method for commonly used regularization functions, such as ℓ1, mixed norm, and trace-norm. 1

Online prediction methods are typically presented as serial algorithms running on a single processor. However, in the age of web-scale prediction problems, it is increasingly common to encounter situations where a single processor cannot keep up with the high rate at which inputs arrive. In this work, we present the distributed mini-batch algorithm, a method of converting many serial gradient-based online prediction algorithms into distributed algorithms. We prove a regret bound for this method that is asymptotically optimal for smooth convex loss functions and stochastic inputs. Moreover, our analysis explicitly takes into account communication latencies between nodes in the distributed environment. We show how our method can be used to solve the closely-related distributed stochastic optimization problem, achieving an asymptotically linear speed-up over multiple processors. Finally, we demonstrate the merits of our approach on a web-scale online prediction problem.

Sparse coding consists in representing signals as sparse linear combinations of atoms selected from a dictionary. We consider an extension of this framework where the atoms are further assumed to be embedded in a tree. This is achieved using a recently introduced tree-structured sparse regularization norm, which has proven useful in several applications. This norm leads to regularized problems that are difficult to optimize, and we propose in this paper efficient algorithms for solving them. More precisely, we show that the proximal operator associated with this norm is computable exactly via a dual approach that can be viewed as the composition of elementary proximal operators. Our procedure has a complexity linear, or close to linear, in the number of atoms, and allows the use of accelerated gradient techniques to solve the tree-structured sparse approximation problem at the same computational cost as traditional ones using the ℓ1-norm. Our method is efficient and scales gracefully to millions of variables, which we illustrate in two types of applications: first, we consider fixed hierarchical dictionaries of wavelets to denoise natural images. Then, we apply our optimization tools in the context of dictionary learning, where learned dictionary elements naturally organize in a prespecified arborescent structure, leading to a better performance in reconstruction of natural image patches. When applied to text documents, our method learns hierarchies of topics, thus providing a competitive alternative to probabilistic topic models.

Onlinepredictionmethodsaretypicallystudied as serial algorithms running on a single processor. In this paper, we present the distributed mini-batch (DMB) framework, a method of converting a serial gradient-based onlinealgorithmintoadistributedalgorithm, and prove an asymptotically optimal regret bound for smooth convex loss functions and stochastic examples. Our analysis explicitly takes into account communication latencies between computing nodes in a network. We also present robust variants, which are resilient to failures and node heterogeneity in an asynchronous distributed environment. Our method can also be used for distributed stochastic optimization, attaining an asymptotically linear speedup. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the merits of our approach on large-scale online prediction problems. 1.

We analyze the convergence of gradient-based optimization algorithms whose updates depend on delayed stochastic gradient information. The main application of our results is to the development of distributed minimizationalgorithmswhereamasternodeperformsparameterupdateswhile worker nodes compute stochastic gradients based on local information in parallel, which may give rise to delays due to asynchrony. Our main contributionistoshowthatforsmoothstochasticproblems,thedelaysareasymptotically negligible. In application to distributed optimization, we show n-node architectures whose optimization error in stochastic problems—in spite of asynchronous delays—scales asymptotically as O(1 / √ nT), which is known to be optimal even in the absence of delays. 1

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We consider multiclass classification problems where the set of labels are organized hierarchically as a category tree. We associate each node in the tree with a classifier and classify the examples recursively from the root to the leaves. We propose a hierarchical Support Vector Machine (SVM) that encourages the classifier at each node to be different from the classifiers at its ancestors. More specifically, we introduce regularizations that force the normal vector of the classifying hyperplane at each node to be orthogonal to those at its ancestors as much as possible. We establish conditions under which training such a hierarchical SVM is a convex optimization problem, anddevelop an efficient dual-averaging method for solving it. 1.

We introduce a new online convex optimization algorithm that adaptively chooses its regularization function based on the loss functions observed so far. This is in contrast to previous algorithms that use a fixed regularization function such as L2-squared, and modify it only via a single time-dependent parameter. Our algorithm’s regret bounds are worst-case optimal, and for certain realistic classes of loss functions they are much better than existing bounds. These bounds are problem-dependent, which means they can exploit the structure of the actual problem instance. Critically, however, our algorithm does not need to know this structure in advance. Rather, we prove competitive guarantees that show the algorithm provides a bound within a constant factor of the best possible bound (of a certain functional form) in hindsight. 1

We develop a novel online learning algorithm for the group lasso in order to efficiently find the important explanatory factors in a grouped manner. Different from traditional batch-mode group lasso algorithms, which suffer from the inefficiency and poor scalability, our proposed algorithm performs in an online mode and scales well: at each iteration one can update the weight vector according to a closed-form solution based on the average of previous subgradients. Therefore, the proposed online algorithm can be very efficient and scalable. This is guaranteed by its low worst-case time complexity and memory cost both in the order of O(d), where d is the number of dimensions. Moreover, in order to achieve more sparsity in both the group level and the individual feature level, we successively extend our online system to efficiently solve a number of variants of sparse group lasso models. We also show that the online system is applicable to other group lasso models, such as the group lasso with overlap and graph lasso. Finally, we demonstrate the merits of our algorithm by experimenting with both synthetic and real-world datasets. 1.