Solving Empirical Risk Minimization in the Current Matrix Multiplication Time

Abstract

Many convex problems in machine learning and computer science share the same form: \begin{align*} \min_{x} \sum_{i} f_i( A_i x + b_i), \end{align*} where $f_i$ are convex functions on $\mathbb{R}^{n_i}$ with constant $n_i$, $A_i \in \mathbb{R}^{n_i \times d}$, $b_i \in \mathbb{R}^{n_i}$ and $\sum_i n_i = n$. This problem generalizes linear programming and includes many problems in empirical risk minimization. In this paper, we give an algorithm that runs in time \begin{align*} O^* ( ( n^ω + n^{2.5 - α/2} + n^{2+ 1/6} ) \log (n / δ) ) \end{align*} where $ω$ is the exponent of matrix multiplication, $α$ is the dual exponent of matrix multiplication, and $δ$ is the relative accuracy. Note that the runtime has only a log dependence on the condition numbers or other data dependent parameters and these are captured in $δ$. For the current bound $ω\sim 2.38$ [Vassilevska Williams'12, Le Gall'14] and $α\sim 0.31$ [Le Gall, Urrutia'18], our runtime $O^* ( n^ω \log (n / δ))$ matches the current best for solving a dense least squares regression problem, a special case of the problem we consider. Very recently, [Alman'18] proved that all the current known techniques can not give a better $ω$ below $2.168$ which is larger than our $2+1/6$. Our result generalizes the very recent result of solving linear programs in the current matrix multiplication time [Cohen, Lee, Song'19] to a more broad class of problems. Our algorithm proposes two concepts which are different from [Cohen, Lee, Song'19] : $\bullet$ We give a robust deterministic central path method, whereas the previous one is a stochastic central path which updates weights by a random sparse vector. $\bullet$ We propose an efficient data-structure to maintain the central path of interior point methods even when the weights update vector is dense.