Related papers: Probable convexity and its application to Correlat…
Submodularity is one of the most well-studied properties of problem classes in combinatorial optimization and many applications of machine learning and data mining, with strong implications for guaranteed optimization. In this thesis, we…
A stochastic-gradient-based interior-point algorithm for minimizing a continuously differentiable objective function (that may be nonconvex) subject to bound constraints is presented, analyzed, and demonstrated through experimental results.…
Many practical optimization problems lack strong convexity. Fortunately, recent studies have revealed that first-order algorithms also enjoy linear convergences under various weaker regularity conditions. While the relationship among…
In this paper, we propose and analyze a trust-region model-based algorithm for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Our framework utilizes random models of an objective function $f(x)$, obtained from stochastic…
We consider the problem of finding critical points of functions that are non-convex and non-smooth. Studying a fairly broad class of such problems, we analyze the behavior of three gradient-based methods (gradient descent, proximal update,…
Sparse learning is a very important tool for mining useful information and patterns from high dimensional data. Non-convex non-smooth regularized learning problems play essential roles in sparse learning, and have drawn extensive attentions…
We introduce a new approach to develop stochastic optimization algorithms for a class of stochastic composite and possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The main idea is to combine two stochastic estimators to create a new hybrid one. We…
Inverse optimization involves inferring unknown parameters of an optimization problem from known solutions and is widely used in fields such as transportation, power systems, and healthcare. We study the contextual inverse optimization…
This paper investigates a specific class of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems in the face of data uncertainty, namely, robust optimization problems, where the given objective function can be expressed as a difference of two…
The convex feasibility problem (CFP) is at the core of the modeling of many problems in various areas of science. Subgradient projection methods are important tools for solving the CFP because they enable the use of subgradient calculations…
We analyse the convergence of the proximal gradient algorithm for convex composite problems in the presence of gradient and proximal computational inaccuracies. We derive new tighter deterministic and probabilistic bounds that we use to…
In this work, we consider convex optimization problems with smooth objective function and nonsmooth functional constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called Stochastic Halfspace Approximation Method (SHAM), to solve…
We present a new framework to address the non-convex robust hypothesis testing problem, wherein the goal is to seek the optimal detector that minimizes the maximum of worst-case type-I and type-II risk functions. The distributional…
Non-convex optimization is a critical tool in advancing machine learning, especially for complex models like deep neural networks and support vector machines. Despite challenges such as multiple local minima and saddle points, non-convex…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
Composite convex optimization problems which include both a nonsmooth term and a low-rank promoting term have important applications in machine learning and signal processing, such as when one wishes to recover an unknown matrix that is…
We present a new algorithm for probabilistic planning with no observability. Our algorithm, called Probabilistic-FF, extends the heuristic forward-search machinery of Conformant-FF to problems with probabilistic uncertainty about both the…
Recently, there has been considerable progress on designing algorithms with provable guarantees -- typically using linear algebraic methods -- for parameter learning in latent variable models. But designing provable algorithms for inference…
The use of min-max optimization in adversarial training of deep neural network classifiers and training of generative adversarial networks has motivated the study of nonconvex-nonconcave optimization objectives, which frequently arise in…
Recently, several studies consider the stochastic optimization problem but in a heavy-tailed noise regime, i.e., the difference between the stochastic gradient and the true gradient is assumed to have a finite $p$-th moment (say being upper…