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We consider unconstrained randomized optimization of convex objective functions. We analyze the Random Pursuit algorithm, which iteratively computes an approximate solution to the optimization problem by repeated optimization over a…
Novel coordinate descent (CD) methods are proposed for minimizing nonconvex functions consisting of three terms: (i) a continuously differentiable term, (ii) a simple convex term, and (iii) a concave and continuous term. First, by extending…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based methods have been widely used for training large-scale machine learning models that also generalize well in practice. Several explanations have been offered for this generalization performance, a…
We develop a novel and single-loop variance-reduced algorithm to solve a class of stochastic nonconvex-convex minimax problems involving a nonconvex-linear objective function, which has various applications in different fields such as…
We consider a family of algorithms that successively sample and minimize simple stochastic models of the objective function. We show that under reasonable conditions on approximation quality and regularity of the models, any such algorithm…
We are interested in derivative-free optimization of high-dimensional functions. The sample complexity of existing methods is high and depends on problem dimensionality, unlike the dimensionality-independent rates of first-order methods.…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
We revisit the standard ``telescoping sum'' argument ubiquitous in the final steps of analyzing evaluation complexity of algorithms for smooth nonconvex optimization, and obtain a refined formulation of the resulting bound as a function of…
We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…
This paper presents and investigates an inexact proximal gradient method for solving composite convex optimization problems characterized by an objective function composed of a sum of a full-domain differentiable convex function and a…
The usual approach to developing and analyzing first-order methods for smooth convex optimization assumes that the gradient of the objective function is uniformly smooth with some Lipschitz constant $L$. However, in many settings the…
This paper presents an algorithm for approximately minimizing a convex function in simple, not necessarily bounded convex domains, assuming only that function values and subgradients are available. No global information about the objective…
The so-called fast inertial relaxation engine is a first-order method for unconstrained smooth optimization problems. It updates the search direction by a linear combination of the past search direction, the current gradient and the…
We revisit the Frank-Wolfe (FW) optimization under strongly convex constraint sets. We provide a faster convergence rate for FW without line search, showing that a previously overlooked variant of FW is indeed faster than the standard…
Many problems of theoretical and practical interest involve finding an optimum over a family of convex functions. For instance, finding the projection on the convex functions in $H^k(\Omega)$, and optimizing functionals arising from some…
In this paper we develop a randomized block-coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of a smooth and a simple nonsmooth block-separable convex function and prove that it obtains an $\epsilon$-accurate solution with probability at…
Various optimal gradient-based algorithms have been developed for smooth nonconvex optimization. However, many nonconvex machine learning problems do not belong to the class of smooth functions and therefore the existing algorithms are…
We present a novel view of nonlinear manifold learning using derivative-free optimization techniques. Specifically, we propose an extension of the classical multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) method, where instead of performing gradient…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function over the intersection of finitely many simple sets which are easy to project onto. This is an important problem arising in various domains such as machine learning. The main difficulty…