Related papers: When Are Nonconvex Problems Not Scary?
A strategy is proposed for characterizing the worst-case performance of algorithms for solving nonconvex smooth optimization problems. Contemporary analyses characterize worst-case performance by providing, under certain assumptions on an…
In many important machine learning applications, the standard assumption of having a globally Lipschitz continuous gradient may fail to hold. This paper delves into a more general $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness setting, which gains particular…
We consider the minimization of submodular functions subject to ordering constraints. We show that this optimization problem can be cast as a convex optimization problem on a space of uni-dimensional measures, with ordering constraints…
We propose a family of nonconvex optimization algorithms that are able to save gradient and negative curvature computations to a large extent, and are guaranteed to find an approximate local minimum with improved runtime complexity. At the…
Optimization problems with rank constraints arise in many applications, including matrix regression, structured PCA, matrix completion and matrix decomposition problems. An attractive heuristic for solving such problems is to factorize the…
Substantial progress has been made recently on developing provably accurate and efficient algorithms for low-rank matrix factorization via nonconvex optimization. While conventional wisdom often takes a dim view of nonconvex optimization…
Constrained second-order convex optimization algorithms are the method of choice when a high accuracy solution to a problem is needed, due to their local quadratic convergence. These algorithms require the solution of a constrained…
In this paper, a globally convergent trust region proximal gradient method is developed for composite multi-objective optimization problems where each objective function can be represented as the sum of a smooth function and a nonsmooth…
This chapter is devoted to the black-box subgradient algorithms with the minimal requirements for the storage of auxiliary results, which are necessary to execute these algorithms. It starts with the original result of N.Z. Shor which open…
Trace norm regularization is a widely used approach for learning low rank matrices. A standard optimization strategy is based on formulating the problem as one of low rank matrix factorization which, however, leads to a non-convex problem.…
In this paper, we propose second-order sufficient optimality conditions for a very general nonconvex constrained optimization problem, which covers many prominent mathematical programs.Unlike the existing results in the literature, our…
Using convex combination and linesearch techniques, we introduce a novel primal-dual algorithm for solving structured convex-concave saddle point problems with a generic smooth nonbilinear coupling term. Our adaptive linesearch strategy…
Decentralized optimization is widely used in different fields of study such as distributed learning, signal processing, and various distributed control problems. In these types of problems, nodes of the network are connected to each other…
We consider solving nonconvex composite optimization problems in which the sum of a smooth function and a nonsmooth function is minimized. Many of convergence analyses of proximal gradient-type methods rely on global descent property…
We show that there are no spurious local minima in the non-convex factorized parametrization of low-rank matrix recovery from incoherent linear measurements. With noisy measurements we show all local minima are very close to a global…
This paper studies first order methods for solving smooth minimax optimization problems $\min_x \max_y g(x,y)$ where $g(\cdot,\cdot)$ is smooth and $g(x,\cdot)$ is concave for each $x$. In terms of $g(\cdot,y)$, we consider two settings --…
We develop new adaptive algorithms for variational inequalities with monotone operators, which capture many problems of interest, notably convex optimization and convex-concave saddle point problems. Our algorithms automatically adapt to…
We consider joint optimization and learning problems arising in real-time decision systems. While most existing work focuses primarily on convex, revenue-based objectives, we extend this line of research to multi-objective formulations. In…
The majorization-minimization (MM) principle is an extremely general framework for deriving optimization algorithms. It includes the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, proximal gradient algorithm, concave-convex procedure, quadratic…
Min-max problems have broad applications in machine learning, including learning with non-decomposable loss and learning with robustness to data distribution. Convex-concave min-max problem is an active topic of research with efficient…