Related papers: Randomized Derivative-Free Optimization of Noisy C…

In this paper, we present a stochastic gradient algorithm for minimizing a smooth objective function that is an expectation over noisy cost samples, and only the latter are observed for any given parameter. Our algorithm employs a gradient…

We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…

We aim to solve a structured convex optimization problem, where a nonsmooth function is composed with a linear operator. When opting for full splitting schemes, usually, primal-dual type methods are employed as they are effective and also…

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has now become one of the mainstream paradigms of neural architecture search. However, it largely suffers from the well-known performance collapse issue…

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…

Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting (STAR) reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), which serves users located on both sides of the surface, has recently emerged as a promising enhancement to the traditional reflective only RIS. Due…

We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function for which derivatives are unavailable, and a convex, nonsmooth function with easy-to-evaluate proximal operator. Of particular focus is the case where the smooth…

This work proposes an accelerated first-order algorithm we call the Robust Momentum Method for optimizing smooth strongly convex functions. The algorithm has a single scalar parameter that can be tuned to trade off robustness to gradient…

We formulate and study a general family of (continuous-time) stochastic dynamics for accelerated first-order minimization of smooth convex functions. Building on an averaging formulation of accelerated mirror descent, we propose a…

Recently, the study of heavy-tailed noises in first-order nonconvex stochastic optimization has gotten a lot of attention since it was recognized as a more realistic condition as suggested by many empirical observations. Specifically, the…

While many distributed optimization algorithms have been proposed for solving smooth or convex problems over the networks, few of them can handle non-convex and non-smooth problems. Based on a proximal primal-dual approach, this paper…

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…

Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…

The minimization of convex functions which are only available through partial and noisy information is a key methodological problem in many disciplines. In this paper we consider convex optimization with noisy zero-th order information,…

We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function in $\R^n$ in a setting where only function evaluations are possible. While importance sampling is one of the most popular techniques used by machine…

Distributed consensus optimization has received considerable attention in recent years; several distributed consensus-based algorithms have been proposed for (nonsmooth) convex and (smooth) nonconvex objective functions. However, the…

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology for future wireless communication systems. However, the conventional RIS can only reflect the incident signal. Hence, it provides a limited coverage, as compared to a…

In this work we investigate stochastic non-convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth loss functions, and the goal is to find an approximate stationary point. The most popular approach to handling such…

We consider derivative-free algorithms for stochastic and non-stochastic convex optimization problems that use only function values rather than gradients. Focusing on non-asymptotic bounds on convergence rates, we show that if pairs of…

This paper explores adaptive variance reduction methods for stochastic optimization based on the STORM technique. Existing adaptive extensions of STORM rely on strong assumptions like bounded gradients and bounded function values, or suffer…