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Stochastic optimization of continuous objectives is at the heart of modern machine learning. However, many important problems are of discrete nature and often involve submodular objectives. We seek to unleash the power of stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Mohammad Reza Karimi , Mario Lucic , Hamed Hassani , Andreas Krause

We aim to solve a structured convex optimization problem, where a nonsmooth function is composed with a linear operator. When opting for full splitting schemes, usually, primal-dual type methods are employed as they are effective and also…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-17 Radu Ioan Bot , Axel Böhm

Gaussian smoothing (GS) is a derivative-free optimization (DFO) algorithm that estimates the gradient of an objective using perturbations of the current parameters sampled from a standard normal distribution. We generalize it to sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Katelyn Gao , Ozan Sener

Building on the blueprint from Goemans and Williamson (1995) for the Max-Cut problem, we construct a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for orthogonally constrained quadratic optimization problems. First, we derive a semidefinite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Ryan Cory-Wright , Jean Pauphilet

In order to solve the minimization of a nonsmooth convex function, we design an inertial second-order dynamic algorithm, which is obtained by approximating the nonsmooth function by a class of smooth functions. By studying the asymptotic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-20 Xin Qu , Wei Bian

We introduce a statistical physics inspired supervised machine learning algorithm for classification and regression problems. The method is based on the invariances or stability of predicted results when known data is represented as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-19 Patrick Chao , Tahereh Mazaheri , Bo Sun , Nicholas B. Weingartner , Zohar Nussinov

In this paper, we study neural networks from the point of view of nonsmooth optimisation, namely, quasidifferential calculus. We restrict ourselves to the case of uniform approximation by a neural network without hidden layers, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-05 Vinesha Peiris , Nadezda Sukhorukova

We present a new algorithm for solving optimization problems with objective functions that are the sum of a smooth function and a (potentially) nonsmooth regularization function, and nonlinear equality constraints. The algorithm may be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-12 Yutong Dai , Xiaoyi Qu , Daniel P. Robinson

In this paper we first study a smooth optimization approach for solving a class of nonsmooth strictly concave maximization problems whose objective functions admit smooth convex minimization reformulations. In particular, we apply…

Methodology · Statistics 2009-04-07 Zhaosong Lu

The non-smooth finite-sum minimization is a fundamental problem in machine learning. This paper develops a distributed stochastic proximal-gradient algorithm with random reshuffling to solve the finite-sum minimization over time-varying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Xia Jiang , Xianlin Zeng , Jian Sun , Jie Chen , Lihua Xie

In stochastic convex optimization problems, most existing adaptive methods rely on prior knowledge about the diameter bound $D$ when the smoothness or the Lipschitz constant is unknown. This often significantly affects performance as only a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-08 Clément Lezane , Alexandre d'Aspremont

This article introduces a novel family of optimization algorithms - Anisotropic Gaussian Smoothing Gradient Descent (AGS-GD), AGS-Stochastic Gradient Descent (AGS-SGD), and AGS-Adam - that employ anisotropic Gaussian smoothing to enhance…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-19 Andrew Starnes , Guannan Zhang , Viktor Reshniak , Clayton Webster

Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Alexandre d'Aspremont , Cristóbal Guzmán , Clément Lezane

We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-22 Eduard Gorbunov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

We consider several classes of highly important semidefinite optimization problems that involve both a convex objective function (smooth or nonsmooth) and additional linear or nonlinear smooth and convex constraints, which are ubiquitous in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-08 Dan Garber , Atara Kaplan

In this paper, we propose a proximal gradient method and an accelerated proximal gradient method for solving composite optimization problems, where the objective function is the sum of a smooth and a convex, possibly nonsmooth, function. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-22 Raghu Bollapragada , Shagun Gupta

We consider the problem of estimating a rank-one matrix in Gaussian noise under a probabilistic model for the left and right factors of the matrix. The probabilistic model can impose constraints on the factors including sparsity and…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-09-16 Alyson K. Fletcher , Sundeep Rangan

A new approach to solving eigenvalue optimization problems for large structured matrices is proposed and studied. The class of optimization problems considered is related to computing structured pseudospectra and their extremal points, and…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Nicola Guglielmi , Christian Lubich , Stefano Sicilia

We propose smoothed primal-dual algorithms for solving stochastic and smooth nonconvex optimization problems with linear inequality constraints. Our algorithms are single-loop and only require a single stochastic gradient based on one…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-11 Ruichuan Huang , Jiawei Zhang , Ahmet Alacaoglu

Supported by the recent contributions in multiple branches, the first-order splitting algorithms became central for structured nonsmooth optimization. In the large-scale or noisy contexts, when only stochastic information on the smooth part…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-05 Andrei Patrascu , Paul Irofti