Papers › Large-Scale Methods for Distributionally Robust Optimization
Large-Scale Methods for Distributionally Robust Optimization
Daniel Levy, Yair Carmon, John C. Duchi, Aaron Sidford
We propose and analyze algorithms for distributionally robust optimization of convex losses with conditional value at risk (CVaR) and χ² divergence uncertainty sets. We prove that our algorithms require a number of gradient evaluations independent of training set size and number of parameters, making them suitable for large-scale applications. For χ² uncertainty sets these are the first such guarantees in the literature, and for CVaR our guarantees scale linearly in the uncertainty level rather than quadratically as in previous work. We also provide lower bounds proving the worst-case optimality of our algorithms for CVaR and a penalized version of the χ² problem. Our primary technical contributions are novel bounds on the bias of batch robust risk estimation and the variance of a multilevel Monte Carlo gradient estimator due to [Blanchet & Glynn, 2015]. Experiments on MNIST and ImageNet confirm the theoretical scaling of our algorithms, which are 9--36 times more efficient than full-batch methods.
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