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(Neal and Hinton, 1998) recast maximum likelihood estimation of any given latent variable model as the minimization of a free energy functional $F$, and the EM algorithm as coordinate descent applied to $F$. Here, we explore alternative…

The performance of standard stochastic approximation implementations can vary significantly based on the choice of the steplength sequence, and in general, little guidance is provided about good choices. Motivated by this gap, in the first…

We provide larger step-size restrictions for which gradient descent based algorithms (almost surely) avoid strict saddle points. In particular, consider a twice differentiable (non-convex) objective function whose gradient has Lipschitz…

We consider a stochastic version of the proximal point algorithm for optimization problems posed on a Hilbert space. A typical application of this is supervised learning. While the method is not new, it has not been extensively analyzed in…

Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…

We present a novel adaptive optimization algorithm for large-scale machine learning problems. Equipped with a low-cost estimate of local curvature and Lipschitz smoothness, our method dynamically adapts the search direction and step-size.…

In recent years, nonconvex minimax problems have attracted significant attention due to their broad applications in machine learning, including generative adversarial networks, robust optimization and adversarial training. Most existing…

We study the oracle complexity of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization, with the algorithm assumed to have access only to local function information. It has been shown by Davis, Drusvyatskiy, and Jiang (2023) that for nonsmooth Lipschitz…

Latent class model (LCM), which is a finite mixture of different categorical distributions, is one of the most widely used models in statistics and machine learning fields. Because of its non-continuous nature and the flexibility in shape,…

This paper presents a stochastic block-coordinate proximal Newton method for minimizing the sum of a blockwise Lipschitz-continuously differentiable function and a separable nonsmooth convex function. At each iteration, the method randomly…

This work presents a new Distributionally Robust Optimization approach, using $p$-Wasserstein metrics, to analyze a stochastic program in a general context. The ambiguity set in this approach depends on the decision variable and is…

We study the problem of minimizing the sum of potentially non-differentiable convex cost functions with partially overlapping dependences in an asynchronous manner, where communication in the network is not coordinated. We study the…

This paper studies a class of distributed optimization problems with coupled equality constraints in networked systems. Many existing distributed algorithms rely on solving local subproblems via the $\operatorname{argmin}$ operator in each…

We propose a first order algorithm, a modified version of FISTA, to solve an optimization problem with an objective function that is a sum of a possibly nonconvex function, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a convex function which can…

We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…

In stochastic optimization, the population risk is generally approximated by the empirical risk. However, in the large-scale setting, minimization of the empirical risk may be computationally restrictive. In this paper, we design an…

We introduce new multilevel methods for solving large-scale unconstrained optimization problems. Specifically, the philosophy of multilevel methods is applied to Newton-type methods that regularize the Newton sub-problem using second order…

The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…

We introduce two new particle-based algorithms for learning latent variable models via marginal maximum likelihood estimation, including one which is entirely tuning-free. Our methods are based on the perspective of marginal maximum…

This paper considers the problem for finding the $(\delta,\epsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point of Lipschitz continuous objective, which is a rich function class to cover a great number of important applications. We construct a zeroth-order…