Related papers: Exact Worst-case Performance of First-order Method…

These notes focus on the minimization of convex functionals using first-order optimization methods, which are fundamental in many areas of applied mathematics and engineering. The primary goal of this document is to introduce and analyze…

We present two approximate versions of the proximal subgradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions (not necessarily differentiable). The algorithms involve, at each iteration, inexact evaluations of the proximal operator…

Optimization problems under affine constraints appear in various areas of machine learning. We consider the task of minimizing a smooth strongly convex function F(x) under the affine constraint Kx=b, with an oracle providing evaluations of…

In this paper, we propose new accelerated methods for smooth convex optimization, called contracting proximal methods. At every step of these methods, we need to minimize a contracted version of the objective function augmented by a…

In this paper we present a first-order method that admits near-optimal convergence rates for convex/concave min-max problems while requiring a simple and intuitive analysis. Similarly to the seminal work of Nemirovski and the recent…

In this paper, we revisit the smooth and strongly-convex-strongly-concave minimax optimization problem. Zhang et al. (2021) and Ibrahim et al. (2020) established the lower bound $\Omega\left(\sqrt{\kappa_x\kappa_y} \log…

In high-stakes engineering applications, optimization algorithms must come with provable worst-case guarantees over a mathematically defined class of problems. Designing for the worst case, however, inevitably sacrifices performance on the…

In this paper we study proximal conditional-gradient (CG) and proximal gradient-projection type algorithms for a block-structured constrained nonconvex optimization model, which arises naturally from tensor data analysis. First, we…

Motivated by recent increased interest in optimization algorithms for non-convex optimization in application to training deep neural networks and other optimization problems in data analysis, we give an overview of recent theoretical…

It is well-known that accelerated gradient first order methods possess optimal complexity estimates for the class of convex smooth minimization problems. In many practical situations, it makes sense to work with inexact gradients. However,…

In this paper, we explore two fundamental first-order algorithms in convex optimization, namely, gradient descent (GD) and proximal gradient method (ProxGD). Our focus is on making these algorithms entirely adaptive by leveraging local…

In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…

We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…

First order methods endowed with global convergence guarantees operate using global lower bounds on the objective. The tightening of the bounds has been shown to increase both the theoretical guarantees and the practical performance. In…

This paper considers an online proximal-gradient method to track the minimizers of a composite convex function that may continuously evolve over time. The online proximal-gradient method is inexact, in the sense that: (i) it relies on an…

Consider convex optimization problems subject to a large number of constraints. We focus on stochastic problems in which the objective takes the form of expected values and the feasible set is the intersection of a large number of convex…

We present a procedure to numerically compute finite step worst case performance guarantees on a given algorithm for the unconstrained optimization of strongly convex functions with Lipschitz continuous gradients. The solution method…

We study first-order methods (FOMs) for solving \emph{composite nonconvex nonsmooth} optimization with linear constraints. Recently, the lower complexity bounds of FOMs on finding an ($\varepsilon,\varepsilon$)-KKT point of the considered…

Invex programs are a special kind of non-convex problems which attain global minima at every stationary point. While classical first-order gradient descent methods can solve them, they converge very slowly. In this paper, we propose new…

We derive several numerical methods for designing optimized first-order algorithms in unconstrained convex optimization settings. Our methods are based on the Performance Estimation Problem (PEP) framework, which casts the worst-case…