Entropic Risk-Averse Generalized Momentum Methods

TL;DR

This paper introduces a risk-averse framework for momentum methods in optimization, balancing convergence speed with the probability of suboptimality using entropic risk measures, and demonstrates improved practical performance.

Contribution

It develops a unified convergence theory for generalized momentum methods and proposes risk-averse parameter selection strategies based on entropic risk measures.

Findings

New convergence bounds for GMM, AGD, and HB methods.

Explicit risk bounds for suboptimality using entropic measures.

Enhanced performance of risk-averse methods on optimization tasks.

Abstract

In the context of first-order algorithms subject to random gradient noise, we study the trade-offs between the convergence rate (which quantifies how fast the initial conditions are forgotten) and the "risk" of suboptimality, i.e. deviations from the expected suboptimality. We focus on a general class of momentum methods (GMM) which recover popular methods such as gradient descent (GD), accelerated gradient descent (AGD), and heavy-ball (HB) method as special cases depending on the choice of GMM parameters. We use well-known risk measures "entropic risk" and "entropic value at risk" to quantify the risk of suboptimality. For strongly convex smooth minimization, we first obtain new convergence rate results for GMM with a unified theory that is also applicable to both AGD and HB, improving some of the existing results for HB. We then provide explicit bounds on the entropic risk and entropic value at risk of suboptimality at a given iterate which also provides direct bounds on the probability that the suboptimality exceeds a given threshold based on Chernoff's inequality. Our results unveil fundamental trade-offs between the convergence rate and the risk of suboptimality. We then plug the entropic risk and convergence rate estimates we obtained in a computationally tractable optimization framework and propose entropic risk-averse GMM (RA-GMM) and entropic risk-averse AGD (RA-AGD) methods which can select the GMM parameters to systematically trade-off the entropic value at risk with the convergence rate. We show that RA-AGD and RA-GMM lead to improved performance on quadratic optimization and logistic regression problems compared to the standard choice of parameters. To our knowledge, our work is the first to resort to coherent measures to design the parameters of momentum methods in a systematic manner.