Related papers: When Are Nonconvex Problems Not Scary?
Finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point of a nonconvex function with a Lipschitz continuous Hessian is a central problem in optimization. Regularized Newton methods are a classical tool and have been studied extensively, yet they still face…
This paper presents an algorithm to solve non-convex optimal control problems, where non-convexity can arise from nonlinear dynamics, and non-convex state and control constraints. This paper assumes that the state and control constraints…
We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…
In this paper, we propose a Dimension-Reduced Second-Order Method (DRSOM) for convex and nonconvex (unconstrained) optimization. Under a trust-region-like framework, our method preserves the convergence of the second-order method while…
Successive quadratic approximations, or second-order proximal methods, are useful for minimizing functions that are a sum of a smooth part and a convex, possibly nonsmooth part that promotes regularization. Most analyses of iteration…
We consider solving large scale nonconvex optimisation problems with nonnegativity constraints. Such problems arise frequently in machine learning, such as nonnegative least-squares, nonnegative matrix factorisation, as well as problems…
Tucker decomposition is a popular technique for many data analysis and machine learning applications. Finding a Tucker decomposition is a nonconvex optimization problem. As the scale of the problems increases, local search algorithms such…
This paper is devoted to the study of stochastic optimization problems under the generalized smoothness assumption. By considering the unbiased gradient oracle in Stochastic Gradient Descent, we provide strategies to achieve in bounds the…
We propose a general theory for studying the \xl{landscape} of nonconvex \xl{optimization} with underlying symmetric structures \tz{for a class of machine learning problems (e.g., low-rank matrix factorization, phase retrieval, and deep…
The min-max optimization problem, also known as the saddle point problem, is a classical optimization problem which is also studied in the context of zero-sum games. Given a class of objective functions, the goal is to find a value for the…
This work aims to solve a stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth composite optimization problem. Previous works on composite optimization problem requires the major part to satisfy Lipschitz smoothness or some relaxed smoothness conditions, which…
Minimax optimization has been central in addressing various applications in machine learning, game theory, and control theory. Prior literature has thus far mainly focused on studying such problems in the continuous domain, e.g.,…
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
Minimax optimization has become a central tool in machine learning with applications in robust optimization, reinforcement learning, GANs, etc. These applications are often nonconvex-nonconcave, but the existing theory is unable to identify…
This work is on constrained large-scale non-convex optimization where the constraint set implies a manifold structure. Solving such problems is important in a multitude of fundamental machine learning tasks. Recent advances on Riemannian…
We introduce new global and local inexact oracle concepts for a wide class of convex functions in composite convex minimization. Such inexact oracles naturally come from primal-dual framework, barrier smoothing, inexact computations of…
Trust region and cubic regularization methods have demonstrated good performance in small scale non-convex optimization, showing the ability to escape from saddle points. Each iteration of these methods involves computation of gradient,…
In this paper, we study local convergence of high-order Tensor Methods for solving convex optimization problems with composite objective. We justify local superlinear convergence under the assumption of uniform convexity of the smooth…
We examine the squared error loss landscape of shallow linear neural networks. We show---with significantly milder assumptions than previous works---that the corresponding optimization problems have benign geometric properties: there are no…
This paper presents a family of algorithms for decentralized convex composite problems. We consider the setting of a network of agents that cooperatively minimize a global objective function composed of a sum of local functions plus a…