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A commonly used heuristic in non-convex optimization is Normalized Gradient Descent (NGD) - a variant of gradient descent in which only the direction of the gradient is taken into account and its magnitude ignored. We analyze this heuristic…
Gradient Descent Ascent (GDA) methods are the mainstream algorithms for minimax optimization in generative adversarial networks (GANs). Convergence properties of GDA have drawn significant interest in the recent literature. Specifically,…
The incremental gradient method is a prominent algorithm for minimizing a finite sum of smooth convex functions, used in many contexts including large-scale data processing applications and distributed optimization over networks. It is a…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
We analyze the convergence of a nonlocal gradient descent method for minimizing a class of high-dimensional non-convex functions, where a directional Gaussian smoothing (DGS) is proposed to define the nonlocal gradient (also referred to as…
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…
We consider minimizing the composite function that consists of a strongly convex function and a convex function. The fast dual proximal gradient (FDPG) method decreases the dual function with a rate $O(1/k^2)$, leading to a rate $O(1/k)$…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…
This paper generalizes the optimized gradient method (OGM) that achieves the optimal worst-case cost function bound of first-order methods for smooth convex minimization. Specifically, this paper studies a generalized formulation of OGM and…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) plays a central role in modern machine learning. While there is extensive work on providing error upper bound for SGD, not much is known about SGD error lower bound. In this paper, we study the convergence…
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…
Large-scale constrained optimization problems are at the core of many tasks in control, signal processing, and machine learning. Notably, problems with functional constraints arise when, beyond a performance{\nobreakdash-}centric goal…
We consider the problem of approximating a function by an element of a nonlinear manifold which admits a differentiable parametrization, typical examples being neural networks with differentiable activation functions or tensor networks.…
In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing continuous submodular functions that naturally arise in many learning applications such as those involving utility functions in active learning and sensing, matrix approximations and network…
It has been observed in a variety of contexts that gradient descent methods have great success in solving low-rank matrix factorization problems, despite the relevant problem formulation being non-convex. We tackle a particular instance of…
We develop an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve the affine rank minimization problem consists of finding a matrix of minimum rank from linear measurements. The proposed algorithm as a stochastic…
In this paper, we study the convergence properties of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method for finding a stationary point of a given objective function $J(\cdot)$. The objective function is not required to be convex. Rather, our…
Recent advances have significantly improved our understanding of the generalization performance of gradient descent (GD) methods in deep neural networks. A natural and fundamental question is whether GD can achieve generalization rates…
This paper rigorously shows how over-parameterization changes the convergence behaviors of gradient descent (GD) for the matrix sensing problem, where the goal is to recover an unknown low-rank ground-truth matrix from near-isotropic linear…
Global minimization is a fundamental challenge in optimization, especially in machine learning, where finding the global minimum of a function directly impacts model performance and convergence. This article introduces a novel optimization…