Efficient Smooth Non-Convex Stochastic Compositional Optimization via Stochastic Recursive Gradient Descent

Wenqing Hu, Chris Junchi Li, Xiangru Lian, Ji Liu, Huizhuo Yuan

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Stochastic compositional optimization arises in many important machine learning applications. The objective function is the composition of two expectations of stochastic functions, and is more challenging to optimize than vanilla stochastic optimization problems. In this paper, we investigate the stochastic compositional optimization in the general smooth non-convex setting.