Sadly, I never did a serious literature review. That said, I naively tried a bunch of naive approaches and had quite a bit of success with plain old gradient d

Sadly, I never did a serious literature review. That said, I naively tried a bunch of naive approaches and had quite a bit of success with plain old gradient descent -- it was really surprising. I'm not sure if it would scale to really significant models, but it's something you could implement in a few hours and you could use to get a project off the ground.