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Ke Wei

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6 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Decentralized Non-convex Stochastic Optimization with Heterogeneous Variance

Hongxu Chen
Ke Wei
Luo Luo

Decentralized optimization is critical for solving large-scale machine learning problems over distributed networks, where multiple nodes collaborate through local communication. In practice, the variances of stochastic gradient estimators often differ across nodes, yet their impact on algorithm design and complexity remains unclear. To address this issue, we propose D-NSS, a decentralized algorithm with node-specific sampling, and establish its sample complexity depending on the arithmetic mean of local standard deviations, achieving tighter bounds than existing methods that rely on the worst-case or quadratic mean. We further derive a matching sample complexity lower bound under heterogeneous variance, thereby proving the optimality of this dependence. Moreover, we extend the framework with a variance reduction technique and develop D-NSS-VR, which under the mean-squared smoothness assumption attains an improved sample complexity bound while preserving the arithmetic-mean dependence. Finally, numerical experiments validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

A Near-Optimal Algorithm for Decentralized Convex-Concave Finite-Sum Minimax Optimization

Hongxu Chen
Ke Wei
Haishan Ye
Luo Luo

In this paper, we study the distributed convex-concave finite-sum minimax optimization over the network, and a decentralized variance-reduced optimistic gradient method with stochastic mini-batch sizes (DIVERSE) is proposed. For the strongly-convex-strongly-concave objective, it is shown that DIVERSE can achieve a linear convergence rate that depends on the global smoothness parameters, yielding sharper computation and communication complexity bounds than existing results. Furthermore, we also establish the lower complexity bounds, which show that our upper bounds are optimal up to a logarithmic factor in terms of the local incremental first-order oracle calls, the computation rounds, and the communication rounds. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms existing methods in practice.

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JMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

On the Convergence of Projected Policy Gradient for Any Constant Step Sizes

Jiacai Liu
Wenye Li
Dachao Lin
Ke Wei
Zhihua Zhang

Projected policy gradient (PPG) is a basic policy optimization method in reinforcement learning. Given access to exact policy evaluations, previous studies have established the sublinear convergence of PPG for sufficiently small step sizes based on the smoothness and the gradient domination properties of the value function. However, as the step size goes to infinity, PPG reduces to the classic policy iteration method, which suggests the convergence of PPG even for large step sizes. In this paper, we fill this gap and show that PPG admits a sublinear convergence for any constant step sizes. Due to the existence of the state-wise visitation measure in the expression of policy gradient, the existing optimization-based analysis framework for a preconditioned version of PPG (i.e., projected Q-ascent) is not applicable, to the best of our knowledge. Instead, we proceed the proof by computing the state-wise improvement lower bound of PPG based on its inherent structure. In addition, the finite iteration convergence of PPG for any constant step size is further established, which is also new. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2025. ( edit, beta )

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JMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

Decentralized Natural Policy Gradient with Variance Reduction for Collaborative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Jinchi Chen
Jie Feng
Weiguo Gao
Ke Wei

This paper studies a policy optimization problem arising from collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning in a decentralized setting where agents communicate with their neighbors over an undirected graph to maximize the sum of their cumulative rewards. A novel decentralized natural policy gradient method, dubbed Momentum-based Decentralized Natural Policy Gradient (MDNPG), is proposed, which incorporates natural gradient, momentum-based variance reduction, and gradient tracking into the decentralized stochastic gradient ascent framework. The $\mathcal{O}(n^{-1}\epsilon^{-3})$ sample complexity for MDNPG to converge to an $\epsilon$-stationary point has been established under standard assumptions, where $n$ is the number of agents. It indicates that MDNPG can achieve the optimal convergence rate for decentralized policy gradient methods and possesses a linear speedup in contrast to centralized optimization methods. Moreover, superior empirical performance of MDNPG over other state-of-the-art algorithms has been demonstrated by extensive numerical experiments. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2024. ( edit, beta )

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JMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Implicit Regularization and Entrywise Convergence of Riemannian Optimization for Low Tucker-Rank Tensor Completion

Haifeng Wang
Jinchi Chen
Ke Wei

This paper is concerned with the low Tucker-rank tensor completion problem, which is about reconstructing a tensor $\mathcal{T}\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times n\times n}$ of low multilinear rank from partially observed entries. Riemannian optimization algorithms are a class of efficient methods for this problem, but the theoretical convergence analysis is still lacking. In this manuscript, we establish the entrywise convergence of the vanilla Riemannian gradient method for low Tucker-rank tensor completion under the nearly optimal sampling complexity $O(n^{3/2})$. Meanwhile, the implicit regularization phenomenon of the algorithm has also been revealed. As far as we know, this is the first work that has shown the entrywise convergence and implicit regularization property of a non-convex method for low Tucker-rank tensor completion. The analysis relies on the leave-one-out technique, and some of the technical results developed in the paper might be of broader interest in investigating the properties of other non-convex methods for this problem. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2023. ( edit, beta )

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JMLR Journal 2019 Journal Article

Accelerated Alternating Projections for Robust Principal Component Analysis

HanQin Cai
Jian-Feng CAI
Ke Wei

We study robust PCA for the fully observed setting, which is about separating a low rank matrix $\BL$ and a sparse matrix $\BS$ from their sum $\BD=\BL+\BS$. In this paper, a new algorithm, dubbed accelerated alternating projections, is introduced for robust PCA which significantly improves the computational efficiency of the existing alternating projections proposed in (Netrapalli et al., 2014) when updating the low rank factor. The acceleration is achieved by first projecting a matrix onto some low dimensional subspace before obtaining a new estimate of the low rank matrix via truncated SVD. Exact recovery guarantee has been established which shows linear convergence of the proposed algorithm. Empirical performance evaluations establish the advantage of our algorithm over other state-of-the-art algorithms for robust PCA. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2019. ( edit, beta )

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