English

Stochastic Compositional Optimization via Hybrid Momentum Frank--Wolfe

Optimization and Control 2026-05-18 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Stochastic compositional optimization minimizes objectives of the form minxXF(f(x),x)\min_{\bm{x} \in \mathcal{X}} F(\bm{f}(\bm{x}), \bm{x}), where f\bm{f} is accessible only through noisy stochastic queries. Existing methods for this problem assume that the outer function FF is continuously differentiable, which excludes many practically important applications such as robust max-of-losses, Conditional Value-at-Risk, and norm regularizers. We propose the Hybrid Momentum Stochastic Frank--Wolfe algorithm, which drops the smoothness assumption on FF. By combining a momentum-based Jacobian tracker with a Taylor-corrected function tracker, the algorithm feeds an entire stochastic linearization -- rather than a single gradient -- into a generalized linear minimization oracle. We establish an O(K1/4)\mathcal{O}(K^{-1/4}) convergence rate in the generalized Frank--Wolfe gap for non-convex objectives with LFL_F-Lipschitz outer functions, matching the optimal complexity for projection-free single-sample stochastic methods under expected smoothness. The analysis extends to heavy-tailed noise oracles with bounded rr-th moments for r(1,2]r \in (1, 2] and recovers the deterministic rates of Vladarean et al (2023) as the noise vanishes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.15350,
  title  = {Stochastic Compositional Optimization via Hybrid Momentum Frank--Wolfe},
  author = {El Mahdi Chayti},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.15350},
  year   = {2026}
}