Adaptive Subgradient Methods for Online Learning and Stochastic Optimization

Abstract

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

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