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We develop multi-step gradient methods for network-constrained optimization of strongly convex functions with Lipschitz-continuous gradients. Given the topology of the underlying network and bounds on the Hessian of the objective function,…

A stochastic-gradient-based interior-point algorithm for minimizing a continuously differentiable objective function (that may be nonconvex) subject to bound constraints is presented, analyzed, and demonstrated through experimental results.…

Stochastic optimization of engineering systems is often infeasible due to repeated evaluations of a computationally expensive, high-fidelity simulation. Bi-fidelity methods mitigate this challenge by leveraging a cheaper, approximate model…

Face recognition is the very significant field in pattern recognition area. It has multiple applications in military and finance, to name a few. In this paper, the combination of the sparse PCA with the nearest-neighbor method (and with the…

Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…

Many core problems in robotics can be framed as constrained optimization problems. Often on these problems, the robotic system has uncertainty, or it would be advantageous to identify multiple high quality feasible solutions. To enable…

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,…

Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization…

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…

We address the problem of recovering a sparse signal from clipped or quantized measurements. We show how these two problems can be formulated as minimizing the distance to a convex feasibility set, which provides a convex and differentiable…

This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…

The stochastic composition optimization proposed recently by Wang et al. [2014] minimizes the objective with the compositional expectation form: $\min_x~(\mathbb{E}_iF_i \circ \mathbb{E}_j G_j)(x).$ It summarizes many important applications…

We present a novel, fast (exponential rate adaption), ab initio (hyper-parameter-free) gradient based optimizer algorithm. The main idea of the method is to adapt the learning rate $\alpha$ by situational awareness, mainly striving for…

Based on the ideas of arXiv:1710.06612, we consider the problem of minimization of the Holder-continuous non-smooth functional $f$ with non-positive convex (generally, non-smooth) Lipschitz-continuous functional constraint. We propose some…

We consider nonconvex-concave minimax optimization problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y\in{\mathcal Y}} f({\bf x},{\bf y})$, where $f$ is strongly-concave in $\bf y$ but possibly nonconvex in $\bf x$ and ${\mathcal Y}$ is a convex…

The accelerated proximal point algorithm (APPA), also known as "Catalyst", is a well-established reduction from convex optimization to approximate proximal point computation (i.e., regularized minimization). This reduction is conceptually…

For finite-dimensional problems, stochastic approximation methods have long been used to solve stochastic optimization problems. Their application to infinite-dimensional problems is less understood, particularly for nonconvex objectives.…

This paper develops a new parameter-free restarted method, namely RPF-SFISTA, and a new parameter-free aggressive regularization method, namely A-REG, for solving strongly convex and convex composite optimization problems, respectively.…

In this paper, we consider the composite optimization problem, where the objective function integrates a continuously differentiable loss function with a nonsmooth regularization term. Moreover, only the function values for the…

Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…