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Efficiently approximating local curvature information of the loss function is a key tool for optimization and compression of deep neural networks. Yet, most existing methods to approximate second-order information have high computational or…
Motivated by emerging applications in machine learning, we consider an optimization problem in a general form where the gradient of the objective function is available through a biased stochastic oracle. We assume a bias-control parameter…
We propose a new homotopy-based conditional gradient method for solving convex optimization problems with a large number of simple conic constraints. Instances of this template naturally appear in semidefinite programming problems arising…
Classical analysis of convex and non-convex optimization methods often requires the Lipshitzness of the gradient, which limits the analysis to functions bounded by quadratics. Recent work relaxed this requirement to a non-uniform smoothness…
We consider non-smooth saddle point optimization problems. To solve these problems, we propose a zeroth-order method under bounded or Lipschitz continuous noise, possible adversarial. In contrast to the state-of-the-art algorithms, our…
In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to solve the Inverse Stochastic Optimal Control (ISOC) problem of the linear-quadratic sensorimotor (LQS) control model. The LQS model represents the current state-of-the-art in describing…
Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…
We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…
Constrained optimization problems where both the objective and constraints may be nonsmooth and nonconvex arise across many learning and data science settings. In this paper, we show for any Lipschitz, weakly convex objectives and…
This paper addresses the optimization problem of minimizing non-convex continuous functions, which is relevant in the context of high-dimensional machine learning applications characterized by over-parametrization. We analyze a randomized…
An algorithm for solving smooth nonconvex optimization problems is proposed that, in the worst-case, takes $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ iterations to drive the norm of the gradient of the objective function below a prescribed positive…
We investigate the problem of finding second-order stationary points (SOSP) in differentially private (DP) stochastic non-convex optimization. Existing methods suffer from two key limitations: (i) inaccurate convergence error rate due to…
In this paper we consider stochastic weakly convex composite problems, however without the existence of a stochastic subgradient oracle. We present a derivative free algorithm that uses a two point approximation for computing a gradient…
A fully stochastic second-order adaptive-regularization method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization is presented which never computes the objective-function value, but yet achieves the optimal $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ complexity…
We study a class of polynomial optimization problems with a robust polynomial matrix inequality (PMI) constraint where the uncertainty set itself is defined also by a PMI. These can be viewed as matrix generalizations of semi-infinite…
Preconditioning is a crucial operation in gradient-based numerical optimisation. It helps decrease the local condition number of a function by appropriately transforming its gradient. For a convex function, where the gradient can be…
We propose a new first-order method for minimizing nonconvex functions with a Lipschitz continuous gradient and Hessian. The proposed method is an accelerated gradient descent with two restart mechanisms and finds a solution where the…
Applications such as unbalanced and fully shuffled regression can be approached by optimizing regularized optimal transport (OT) distances, such as the entropic OT and Sinkhorn distances. A common approach for this optimization is to use a…
Gradient dominance property is a condition weaker than strong convexity, yet sufficiently ensures global convergence even in non-convex optimization. This property finds wide applications in machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL),…
We consider the case of derivative-free algorithms for non-convex optimization, also known as zero order algorithms, that use only function evaluations rather than gradients. For a wide variety of gradient approximators based on finite…