One Sample Stochastic Frank-Wolfe
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One of the beauties of the projected gradient descent method lies in its rather simple mechanism and yet stable behavior with inexact, stochastic gradients, which has led to its wide-spread use in many machine learning applications. However, once we replace the projection operator with a simpler linear program, as is done in the Frank-Wolfe method, both simplicity and stability take a serious hit. The aim of this paper is to bring them back without sacrificing the efficiency. In this paper, we propose the first one-sample stochastic Frank-Wolfe algorithm, called 1-SFW, that avoids the need to carefully tune the batch size, step size, learning rate, and other complicated hyper parameters. In particular, 1-SFW achieves the optimal convergence rate of O(1/ϵ^2) for reaching an ϵ-suboptimal solution in the stochastic convex setting, and a (1-1/e)-ϵ approximate solution for a stochastic monotone DR-submodular maximization problem. Moreover, in a general non-convex setting, 1-SFW finds an ϵ-first-order stationary point after at most O(1/ϵ^3) iterations, achieving the current best known convergence rate. All of this is possible by designing a novel unbiased momentum estimator that governs the stability of the optimization process while using a single sample at each iteration.
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