Related papers: Virtuous smoothing for global optimization
Our work focuses on stochastic gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer. Research on this class of problem is quite limited, and until recently no non-asymptotic convergence…
We propose a proximal variable smoothing algorithm for nonsmooth optimization problem with sum of three functions involving weakly convex composite function. The proposed algorithm is designed as a time-varying forward-backward splitting…
This paper presents a lower bound for optimizing a finite sum of $n$ functions, where each function is $L$-smooth and the sum is $\mu$-strongly convex. We show that no algorithm can reach an error $\epsilon$ in minimizing all functions from…
In this paper, we study the iteration complexity of cubic regularization of Newton method for solving composite minimization problems with uniformly convex objective. We introduce the notion of second-order condition number of a certain…
We extend Robust Optimization to fractional programming, where both the objective and the constraints contain uncertain parameters. Earlier work did not consider uncertainty in both the objective and the constraints, or did not use Robust…
We study the smooth structure of convex functions by generalizing a powerful concept so-called self-concordance introduced by Nesterov and Nemirovskii in the early 1990s to a broader class of convex functions, which we call generalized…
In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of nonsmooth and convex functions. Such problems often arise in typical machine learning problems as empirical risk minimization, but are computationally…
Optimization problems with composite functions consist of an objective function which is the sum of a smooth and a (convex) nonsmooth term. This particular structure is exploited by the class of proximal gradient methods and some of their…
Matrix square roots and their inverses arise frequently in machine learning, e.g., when sampling from high-dimensional Gaussians $\mathcal{N}(\mathbf 0, \mathbf K)$ or whitening a vector $\mathbf b$ against covariance matrix $\mathbf K$.…
We use the concept of barrier-based smoothing approximations introduced in [ C. B. Chua and Z. Li, A barrier-based smoothing proximal point algorithm for NCPs over closed convex cones, SIOPT 23(2), 2010] to extend the non-interior…
This paper extends the SQP-approach of the well-known bundle-Newton method for nonsmooth unconstrained minimization to the nonlinearly constrained case. Instead of using a penalty function or a filter or an improvement function to deal with…
We consider the task of decentralized minimization of the sum of smooth strongly convex functions stored across the nodes of a network. For this problem, lower bounds on the number of gradient computations and the number of communication…
Optimization algorithms and Monte Carlo sampling algorithms have provided the computational foundations for the rapid growth in applications of statistical machine learning in recent years. There is, however, limited theoretical…
Convex nonsmooth optimization problems, whose solutions live in very high dimensional spaces, have become ubiquitous. To solve them, the class of first-order algorithms known as proximal splitting algorithms is particularly adequate: they…
We present an optimization algorithm that can identify a global minimum of a potentially nonconvex smooth function with high probability, assuming the Gibbs measure of the potential satisfies a logarithmic Sobolev inequality. Our…
Classical analysis of convex and non-convex optimization methods often requires the Lipshitzness of the gradient, which limits the analysis to functions bounded by quadratics. Recent work relaxed this requirement to a non-uniform smoothness…
In this paper, we find the special case of the subgradient method minimizing a one-dimensional real-valued function, which we term the specular gradient method, that converges root-linearly without any additional assumptions except the…
We introduce a notion of self-concordant smoothing for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth and the other nonsmooth. The key highlight is a natural property of the resulting problem's structure that yields a…
We present a new algorithm for solving optimization problems with objective functions that are the sum of a smooth function and a (potentially) nonsmooth regularization function, and nonlinear equality constraints. The algorithm may be…
Higher-order tensor methods were recently proposed for minimizing smooth convex and nonconvex functions. Higher-order algorithms accelerate the convergence of the classical first-order methods thanks to the higher-order derivatives used in…