Related papers: Optimal rates for first-order stochastic convex op…
We study stochastic inexact Newton methods and consider their application in nonconvex settings. Building on the work of [R. Bollapragada, R. H. Byrd, and J. Nocedal, IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, 39 (2018), pp. 545--578] we derive…
We study the problem of minimizing a strongly convex, smooth function when we have noisy estimates of its gradient. We propose a novel multistage accelerated algorithm that is universally optimal in the sense that it achieves the optimal…
In this paper, we revisit the smooth and strongly-convex-strongly-concave minimax optimization problem. Zhang et al. (2021) and Ibrahim et al. (2020) established the lower bound $\Omega\left(\sqrt{\kappa_x\kappa_y} \log…
Estimation of convex functions finds broad applications in engineering and science, while convex shape constraint gives rise to numerous challenges in asymptotic performance analysis. This paper is devoted to minimax optimal estimation of…
We propose and analyze a class of second-order dynamical systems for continuous-time optimization that incorporate fractional-order gradient terms. The system is given by \begin{equation} \ddot{x}(t) + \frac{\alpha}{t}\dot{x}(t) +…
We study learning problems involving arbitrary classes of functions $F$, distributions $X$ and targets $Y$. Because proper learning procedures, i.e., procedures that are only allowed to select functions in $F$, tend to perform poorly unless…
Stochastic heavy ball momentum (SHB) is commonly used to train machine learning models, and often provides empirical improvements over stochastic gradient descent. By primarily focusing on strongly-convex quadratics, we aim to better…
We propose an efficient algorithm for finding first-order Nash equilibria in min-max problems of the form $\min_{x \in X}\max_{y\in Y} F(x,y)$, where the objective function is smooth in both variables and concave with respect to $y$; the…
In this work, we study the computational complexity of reducing the squared gradient magnitude for smooth minimax optimization problems. First, we present algorithms with accelerated $\mathcal{O}(1/k^2)$ last-iterate rates, faster than the…
Bilevel optimization minimizes an objective function, defined by an upper-level problem whose feasible region is the solution of a lower-level problem. We study the oracle complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point with…
Decentralized optimization with time-varying networks is an emerging paradigm in machine learning. It saves remarkable communication overhead in large-scale deep training and is more robust in wireless scenarios especially when nodes are…
In practical applications of iterative first-order optimization, the learning rate schedule remains notoriously difficult to understand and expensive to tune. We demonstrate the presence of these subtleties even in the innocuous case when…
We analyze worst-case convergence guarantees of first-order optimization methods over a function class extending that of smooth and convex functions. This class contains convex functions that admit a simple quadratic upper bound. Its study…
This work proposes a universal and adaptive second-order method for minimizing second-order smooth, convex functions. Our algorithm achieves $O(\sigma / \sqrt{T})$ convergence when the oracle feedback is stochastic with variance $\sigma^2$,…
We consider in this paper a class of single-ratio fractional minimization problems, in which the numerator part of the objective is the sum of a nonsmooth nonconvex function and a smooth nonconvex function while the denominator part is a…
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 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…
We consider a statistical inverse learning problem, where the task is to estimate a function $f$ based on noisy point evaluations of $Af$, where $A$ is a linear operator. The function $Af$ is evaluated at i.i.d. random design points $u_n$,…
We study the intrinsic limitations of sequential convex optimization through the lens of feedback information theory. In the oracle model of optimization, an algorithm queries an {\em oracle} for noisy information about the unknown…
Stochastic nonconvex-concave min-max saddle point problems appear in many machine learning and control problems including distributionally robust optimization, generative adversarial networks, and adversarial learning. In this paper, we…