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First-order methods for minimization and saddle point (min-max) problems are widely used for solving large-scale problems, in particular arising in machine learning. The majority of works obtain favorable complexity guarantees of such…
We provide improved convergence rates for various \emph{non-smooth} optimization problems via higher-order accelerated methods. In the case of $\ell_\infty$ regression, we achieves an $O(\epsilon^{-4/5})$ iteration complexity, breaking the…
Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…
Line search (or backtracking) procedures have been widely employed into first-order methods for solving convex optimization problems, especially those with unknown problem parameters (e.g., Lipschitz constant). In this paper, we show that…
We introduce a novel approach for analyzing the performance of first-order black-box optimization methods. We focus on smooth unconstrained convex minimization over the Euclidean space $R^d$. Our approach relies on the observation that by…
In this paper, we suggest a new framework for analyzing primal subgradient methods for nonsmooth convex optimization problems. We show that the classical step-size rules, based on normalization of subgradient, or on the knowledge of optimal…
In this paper, we define a new type of nonsmooth convex function, called {\em first-order SDSOS-convex semi-algebraic function}, which is an extension of the previously proposed first-order SDSOS-convex polynomials (Chuong et al. in J…
Provably solving stochastic convex optimization problems with constraints is essential for various problems in science, business, and statistics. Recently proposed XOR-Stochastic Gradient Descent (XOR-SGD) provides a convergence rate…
In this paper, we consider the minimization of a nonsmooth nonconvex objective function $f(x)$ over a closed convex subset $\mathcal{X}$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, with additional nonsmooth nonconvex constraints $c(x) = 0$. We develop a unified…
For the general problem of minimizing a convex function over a compact convex domain, we will investigate a simple iterative approximation algorithm based on the method by Frank & Wolfe 1956, that does not need projection steps in order to…
We study the robustness of accelerated first-order algorithms to stochastic uncertainties in gradient evaluation. Specifically, for unconstrained, smooth, strongly convex optimization problems, we examine the mean-squared error in the…
In this paper, we investigate accelerated first-order methods for smooth convex optimization problems under inexact information on the gradient of the objective. The noise in the gradient is considered to be additive with two possibilities:…
We obtain a new lower bound on the information-based complexity of first-order minimization of smooth and convex functions. We show that the bound matches the worst-case performance of the recently introduced Optimized Gradient Method,…
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.…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
We propose a family of optimization methods that achieve linear convergence using first-order gradient information and constant step sizes on a class of convex functions much larger than the smooth and strongly convex ones. This larger…
There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…
Minimizing a convex function over the spectrahedron, i.e., the set of all positive semidefinite matrices with unit trace, is an important optimization task with many applications in optimization, machine learning, and signal processing. It…
We propose new sequential simulation-optimization algorithms for general convex optimization via simulation problems with high-dimensional discrete decision space. The performance of each choice of discrete decision variables is evaluated…
In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…