We propose mS2GD: a method incorporating a mini-batching scheme for improving the theoretical complexity and practical performance of semi-stochastic gradient descent (S2GD). We consider the problem of minimizing a strongly convex function represented as the sum of an average of a large number of smooth convex functions, and a simple nonsmooth convex regularizer. Our method first performs a deterministic step (computation of the gradient of the objective function at the starting point), followed by a large number of stochastic steps. The process is repeated a few times with the last iterate becoming the new starting point. The novelty of our method is in introduction of mini-batching into the computation of stochastic steps. In each step, instead of choosing a single function, we sample $b$ functions, compute their gradients, and compute the direction based on this. We analyze the complexity of the method and show that it benefits from two speedup effects. First, we prove that as long as $b$ is below a certain threshold, we can reach any predefined accuracy with less overall work than without mini-batching. Second, our mini-batching scheme admits a simple parallel implementation, and hence is suitable for further acceleration by parallelization.

提出了一种利用小批量方案改进半随机梯度下降（S2GD）方法的 mS2GD，该方法主要用于最小化一个由很多光滑凸函数的平均值和一个简单的非光滑凸正则化器组成的强凸函数，分析表明，该方法在具有小批量效应和简单并行实现方案的情况下，可以加速算法的收敛过程。

近端设置下的小批量半随机梯度下降