Related papers: On the Powerball Method for Optimization

Policy gradient (PG) methods are popular and efficient for large-scale reinforcement learning due to their relative stability and incremental nature. In recent years, the empirical success of PG methods has led to the development of a…

Gradient methods are widely used in optimization problems. In practice, while the smoothness parameter can be estimated utilizing techniques such as backtracking, estimating the strong convexity parameter remains a challenge; moreover, even…

We focus on the optimization problem with smooth, possibly nonconvex objectives and a convex constraint set for which the Euclidean projection operation is practically available. Focusing on this setting, we carry out a general convergence…

We propose an accelerated forward-backward method with fast convergence rate for finding a minimizer of a decomposable nonsmooth convex function over a closed convex set, and name it smoothing accelerated proximal gradient (SAPG) algorithm.…

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

We study a new penalty reformulation of constrained convex optimization based on the softplus penalty function. We develop novel and tight upper bounds on the objective value gap and the violation of constraints for the solutions to the…

We analyze the convergence rate of an accelerated backward forward method for solving convex composite optimization problems. The method was developed by Taylor, Hendrickx and Glineur, and is different from the FISTA algorithm in its…

We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…

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…

We propose an adaptive accelerated gradient method for solving smooth convex optimization problems. The method incorporates a scheme to determine the step size adaptively, by means of a local estimation of the smoothness constant, which is…

In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…

We examine the behavior of accelerated gradient methods in smooth nonconvex unconstrained optimization, focusing in particular on their behavior near strict saddle points. Accelerated methods are iterative methods that typically step along…

Non-smooth and non-convex global optimization poses significant challenges across various applications, where standard gradient-based methods often struggle. We propose the Ball-Proximal Point Method, Broximal Point Method, or Ball Point…

This paper proposes QPALM, a proximal augmented Lagrangian method based on quadratic approximations, for solving nonlinear programming problems with weakly convex objective and constraint functions. The algorithm is constructed by…

In this work, we consider convex optimization problems with smooth objective function and nonsmooth functional constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called Stochastic Halfspace Approximation Method (SHAM), to solve…

We analyze a fast incremental aggregated gradient method for optimizing nonconvex problems of the form $\min_x \sum_i f_i(x)$. Specifically, we analyze the SAGA algorithm within an Incremental First-order Oracle framework, and show that it…

In [19], a general, inexact, efficient proximal quasi-Newton algorithm for composite optimization problems has been proposed and a sublinear global convergence rate has been established. In this paper, we analyze the convergence properties…

In this work we introduce a new optimisation method called SAGA in the spirit of SAG, SDCA, MISO and SVRG, a set of recently proposed incremental gradient algorithms with fast linear convergence rates. SAGA improves on the theory behind SAG…

An efficient proximal-gradient-based method, called proximal extrapolated gradient method, is designed for solving monotone variational inequality in Hilbert space. The proposed method extends the acceptable range of parameters to obtain…

We present a family of algorithms, called descent algorithms, for optimizing convex and non-convex functions. We also introduce a new first-order algorithm, called rescaled gradient descent (RGD), and show that RGD achieves a faster…