Related papers: Fast Stochastic Methods for Nonsmooth Nonconvex Op…
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…
This paper reviews the gradient sampling methodology for solving nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems. An intuitively straightforward gradient sampling algorithm is stated and its convergence properties are summarized. Throughout this…
This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…
We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…
We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
In this paper, we investigate the non-asymptotic stationary convergence behavior of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) for nonconvex optimization. We focus on a general class of nonconvex nonsmooth stochastic optimization problems, in which…
The non-smooth finite-sum minimization is a fundamental problem in machine learning. This paper develops a distributed stochastic proximal-gradient algorithm with random reshuffling to solve the finite-sum minimization over time-varying…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
In this paper we analyze several new methods for solving nonconvex optimization problems with the objective function formed as a sum of two terms: one is nonconvex and smooth, and another is convex but simple and its structure is known.…
Motivated by the conspicuous use of momentum-based algorithms in deep learning, we study a nonsmooth nonconvex stochastic heavy ball method and show its convergence. Our approach builds upon semialgebraic (definable) assumptions commonly…
We present a stochastic setting for optimization problems with nonsmooth convex separable objective functions over linear equality constraints. To solve such problems, we propose a stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers…
Composite convex optimization problems which include both a nonsmooth term and a low-rank promoting term have important applications in machine learning and signal processing, such as when one wishes to recover an unknown matrix that is…
It is well-known that given a bounded, smooth nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (where the gradient norm is less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ iterations. However,…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…
We consider the unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is composed of a smooth and a non-smooth conponents where the smooth component is the expectation a random function. This type of problem arises in some interesting…
We present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…
Sparse learning is a very important tool for mining useful information and patterns from high dimensional data. Non-convex non-smooth regularized learning problems play essential roles in sparse learning, and have drawn extensive attentions…
We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a non-smooth convex function using proximal-gradient methods, where an error is present in the calculation of the gradient of the smooth term or in the proximity…
We study stochastic algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems with a convex yet possibly nonsmooth regularizer, which find wide applications in many practical machine learning applications. However, compared to asynchronous…