This paper investigates stochastic multi-level optimization where the objective is a nested composition of several smooth non-convex functions. We assume that only stochastic estimates of the gradient and function values for each level are accessible. Consequently, obtaining an accurate estimate of the overall gradient …
Stochastic recursive momentum (STORM) achieves fast convergence for nonconvex optimization via the variance reduction effect, but existing analyses rely on the strong average smoothness assumption. In this paper, we study the convergence of STORM for different objectives without average smoothness. We first revisit the …
Agnostic federated learning (AFL) seeks a model that performs reliably across $m$ heterogeneous workers, but communication remains a bottleneck. We improve communication efficiency by reducing the number of synchronization rounds via faster convergence and the communication cost per round via compression. We first prop …
Parameter-efficient adaptation enables continual learners to acquire task-specific knowledge through compact model updates while maintaining strong within-task performance. However, class-incremental inference requires each input to be classified among all classes seen so far without access to its task identity. For le …