Stochastic Gradient Methods with Preconditioned Updates

This work considers the non-convex finite-sum minimization problem. There are several algorithms for such problems, but existing methods often work poorly when the problem is badly scaled and/or ill-conditioned, and a primary goal of this work is to introduce methods that alleviate this issue. Thus, here we include a preconditioner based on Hutchinson’s approach to approximating the diagonal of the Hessian and couple it with several gradient-based methods to give new ‘scaled’ algorithms: Scaled SARAH and Scaled L-SVRG. Theoretical complexity guarantees under smoothness assumptions are presented. We prove linear convergence when both smoothness and the PL-condition are assumed. Our adaptively scaled methods use approximate partial second-order curvature information and, therefore, can better mitigate the impact of badly scaled problems. This improved practical performance is demonstrated in the numerical experiments also presented in this work.