The question of how to incorporate curvature information in stochastic
approximation methods is challenging. The direct application of classical
quasi- Newton updating techniques for deterministic optimization leads to noisy
curvature estimates that have harmful effects on the robustness of the
iteration. In this paper, we propose a stochastic quasi-Newton method that is
efficient, robust and scalable. It employs the classical BFGS update formula in
its limited memory form, and is based on the observation that it is beneficial
to collect curvature information pointwise, and at regular intervals, through
(sub-sampled) Hessian-vector products. This technique differs from the
classical approach that would compute differences of gradients, and where
controlling the quality of the curvature estimates can be difficult. We present
numerical results on problems arising in machine learning that suggest that the
proposed method shows much promise.

本文提出了一种基于限制记忆的 BFGS 更新公式和子采样 Hessian - 向量积的随机拟牛顿方法来有效地、稳健地和可伸缩地处理如何将曲率信息纳入随机逼近方法的问题，并通过机器学习问题上的数值结果展示其前景。