We present and analyze several strategies for improving the performance ofstochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods. We first show that theconvergence rate of these methods can be preserved under a decreasing sequenceof errors in the control variate, and use this to derive variants of SVRG that usegrowing-batch strategies to reduce the number of gradient calculations requiredin the early iterations. We further (i) show how to exploit support vectors to reducethe number of gradient computations in the later iterations, (ii) prove that thecommonly–used regularized SVRG iteration is justified and improves the convergencerate, (iii) consider alternate mini-batch selection strategies, and (iv) considerthe generalization error of the method.