Related papers: On the Linear Convergence of the Approximate Proxi…

We study stochastic algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems with a convex yet possibly nonsmooth regularizer, which find wide applications in many practical machine learning applications. However, compared to asynchronous…

We focus on the problem of minimizing the sum of smooth component functions (where the sum is strongly convex) and a non-smooth convex function, which arises in regularized empirical risk minimization in machine learning and distributed…

We analyze the convergence rate of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for minimizing the sum of two or more nonsmooth convex separable functions subject to linear constraints. Previous analysis of the ADMM typically…

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of three convex functions: i) a smooth function $f$ in the form of an expectation or a finite average, ii) a non-smooth function $g$ in the form of a finite average of proximable functions…

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…

In this paper, we propose a proximal stochasitc gradient algorithm (PSGA) for solving composite optimization problems by incorporating variance reduction techniques and an adaptive step-size strategy. In the PSGA method, the objective…

The goal of this paper is to study approaches to bridge the gap between first-order and second-order type methods for composite convex programs. Our key observations are: i) Many well-known operator splitting methods, such as…

The full approximation storage (FAS) scheme is a widely used multigrid method for nonlinear problems. In this paper, a new framework to design and analyze FAS-like schemes for convex optimization problems is developed. The new method, the…

We develop subgradient- and gradient-based methods for minimizing strongly convex functions under a notion which generalizes the standard Euclidean strong convexity. We propose a unifying framework for subgradient methods which yields two…

We study sampling problems associated with potentials that lack smoothness. The potentials can be either convex or non-convex. Departing from the standard smooth setting, the potentials are only assumed to be weakly smooth or non-smooth, or…

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of a broad range of variations of the stochastic proximal point method (SPPM). Proximal point methods have attracted considerable interest owing to their numerical stability and robustness…

This paper presents smoothing schemes for obtaining approximate stationary points of unconstrained or linearly-constrained composite nonconvex-concave min-max (and hence nonsmooth) problems by applying well-known algorithms to composite…

This paper studies efficient distributed optimization methods for multi-agent networks. Specifically, we consider a convex optimization problem with a globally coupled linear equality constraint and local polyhedra constraints, and develop…

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…

Our main goal in this paper is to show that one can skip gradient computations for gradient descent type methods applied to certain structured convex programming (CP) problems. To this end, we first present an accelerated gradient sliding…

In this paper, we propose a unified framework of inexact stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) for solving nonconvex problems subject to linear constraints, whose objective comprises an average of finite-sum smooth…

For minimizing a strongly convex objective function subject to linear inequality constraints, we consider a penalty approach that allows one to utilize stochastic methods for problems with a large number of constraints and/or objective…

In this paper we analyze several new methods for solving nonconvex optimization problems with the objective function formed as a sum of two terms: one is nonconvex and smooth, and another is convex but simple and its structure is known.…

We study the problem of minimizing a $m$-weakly convex and possibly nonsmooth function. Weak convexity provides a broad framework that subsumes convex, smooth, and many composite nonconvex functions. In this work, we propose a…

This paper proposes and analyzes a communication-efficient distributed optimization framework for general nonconvex nonsmooth signal processing and machine learning problems under an asynchronous protocol. At each iteration, worker machines…