Related papers: Non-strongly-convex smooth stochastic approximatio…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function that is evolving according to unknown and possibly stochastic dynamics, which may depend jointly on time and on the decision variable itself. Such problems abound in the machine…
Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…
Decentralized optimization with orthogonality constraints is found widely in scientific computing and data science. Since the orthogonality constraints are nonconvex, it is quite challenging to design efficient algorithms. Existing…
The vast majority of convergence rates analysis for stochastic gradient methods in the literature focus on convergence in expectation, whereas trajectory-wise almost sure convergence is clearly important to ensure that any instantiation of…
We study fundamental limits of first-order stochastic optimization in a range of nonconvex settings, including L-smooth functions satisfying Quasar-Convexity (QC), Quadratic Growth (QG), and Restricted Secant Inequalities (RSI). While the…
Stochastic gradient algorithms estimate the gradient based on only one or a few samples and enjoy low computational cost per iteration. They have been widely used in large-scale optimization problems. However, stochastic gradient algorithms…
The subgradient method is one of the most fundamental algorithmic schemes for nonsmooth optimization. The existing complexity and convergence results for this method are mainly derived for Lipschitz continuous objective functions. In this…
In this work, we study the iteration complexity of gradient methods for minimizing convex quadratic functions regularized by powers of Euclidean norms. We show that, due to the uniform convexity of the objective, gradient methods have…
This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…
Bilevel optimization has been developed for many machine learning tasks with large-scale and high-dimensional data. This paper considers a constrained bilevel optimization problem, where the lower-level optimization problem is convex with…
We study the problem of estimating low-rank matrices from linear measurements (a.k.a., matrix sensing) through nonconvex optimization. We propose an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve a nonconvex…
The analysis in Part I revealed interesting properties for subgradient learning algorithms in the context of stochastic optimization when gradient noise is present. These algorithms are used when the risk functions are non-smooth and…
This paper studies a stochastic algorithm for linearly constrained nonconvex optimization, where the objective function is smooth but only unbiased stochastic gradients with bounded variance are available. We propose a momentum-based…
Linear regression is a basic and widely-used methodology in data analysis. It is known that some quantum algorithms efficiently perform least squares linear regression of an exponentially large data set. However, if we obtain values of the…
We analyze stochastic gradient descent for optimizing non-convex functions. In many cases for non-convex functions the goal is to find a reasonable local minimum, and the main concern is that gradient updates are trapped in saddle points.…
The Frank-Wolfe optimization algorithm has recently regained popularity for machine learning applications due to its projection-free property and its ability to handle structured constraints. However, in the stochastic learning setting, it…
We study a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems in which the objective is a sum of two functions: One function is the average of a large number of differentiable functions, while the other function is proper, lower…
Invex programs are a special kind of non-convex problems which attain global minima at every stationary point. While classical first-order gradient descent methods can solve them, they converge very slowly. In this paper, we propose new…
We design a non-convex second-order optimization algorithm that is guaranteed to return an approximate local minimum in time which scales linearly in the underlying dimension and the number of training examples. The time complexity of our…