Related papers: A Stochastic Smoothing Algorithm for Semidefinite …
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…
Several problems in modeling and control of stochastically-driven dynamical systems can be cast as regularized semi-definite programs. We examine two such representative problems and show that they can be formulated in a similar manner. The…
Optimization of convex functions under stochastic zeroth-order feedback has been a major and challenging question in online learning. In this work, we consider the problem of optimizing second-order smooth and strongly convex functions…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
Stochastic approximation is a framework unifying many random iterative algorithms occurring in a diverse range of applications. The stability of the process is often difficult to verify in practical applications and the process may even be…
We introduce a new second order stochastic algorithm to estimate the entropically regularized optimal transport cost between two probability measures. The source measure can be arbitrary chosen, either absolutely continuous or discrete,…
We propose an adaptive smoothing algorithm based on Nesterov's smoothing technique in \cite{Nesterov2005c} for solving "fully" nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems. Our method combines both Nesterov's accelerated proximal…
We introduce deterministic perturbation schemes for the recently proposed random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA) [17], and propose new first-order and second-order algorithms. In the latter case, these are the first second-order…
We present a general probabilistic perspective on Gaussian filtering and smoothing. This allows us to show that common approaches to Gaussian filtering/smoothing can be distinguished solely by their methods of computing/approximating the…
Using quasi-Newton methods in stochastic optimization is not a trivial task given the difficulty of extracting curvature information from the noisy gradients. Moreover, pre-conditioning noisy gradient observations tend to amplify the noise.…
There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…
This paper considers stochastic first-order algorithms for convex-concave minimax problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y}f(\bf x, \bf y)$, where $f$ can be presented by the average of $n$ individual components which are $L$-average…
Standard first-order stochastic optimization algorithms base their updates solely on the average mini-batch gradient, and it has been shown that tracking additional quantities such as the curvature can help de-sensitize common…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
Submodular maximization is one of the central topics in combinatorial optimization. It has found numerous applications in the real world. In the past decades, a series of algorithms have been proposed for this problem. However, most of the…
We develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…
We propose a single time-scale stochastic subgradient method for constrained optimization of a composition of several nonsmooth and nonconvex functions. The functions are assumed to be locally Lipschitz and differentiable in a generalized…
In this work, we consider methods for solving large-scale optimization problems with a possibly nonsmooth objective function. The key idea is to first specify a class of optimization algorithms using a generic iterative scheme involving…
The growing prevalence of nonsmooth optimization problems in machine learning has spurred significant interest in generalized smoothness assumptions. Among these, the (L0, L1)-smoothness assumption has emerged as one of the most prominent.…
Hyperparameter tuning is a challenging problem especially when the system itself involves uncertainty. Due to noisy function evaluations, optimization under uncertainty can be computationally expensive. In this paper, we present a novel…