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This document introduces a strategy to solve linear optimization problems. The strategy is based on the bounding condition each constraint produces on each one of the problem's dimension. The solution of a linear optimization problem is…

It is well-known by now that the BFGS method is an effective method for minimizing nonsmooth functions. However, despite its popularity, theoretical convergence results are almost non-existent. One of the difficulties when analyzing the…

Classical convergence analyses for optimization algorithms rely on the widely-adopted uniform smoothness assumption. However, recent experimental studies have demonstrated that many machine learning problems exhibit non-uniform smoothness,…

In this paper, we study neural networks from the point of view of nonsmooth optimisation, namely, quasidifferential calculus. We restrict ourselves to the case of uniform approximation by a neural network without hidden layers, the…

Motivated by applications in reinforcement learning (RL), we study a nonlinear stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm under Markovian noise, and establish its finite-sample convergence bounds under various stepsizes. Specifically, we show…

Successive quadratic approximations, or second-order proximal methods, are useful for minimizing functions that are a sum of a smooth part and a convex, possibly nonsmooth part that promotes regularization. Most analyses of iteration…

In this paper, we propose a general class of algorithms for optimizing an extensive variety of nonsmoothly penalized objective functions that satisfy certain regularity conditions. The proposed framework utilizes the…

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 consider the problem of minimizing a difference-of-convex objective over a nonlinear conic constraint, where the cone is closed, convex, pointed and has a nonempty interior. We assume that the support function of a compact…

This work concerns the local convergence theory of Newton and quasi-Newton methods for convex-composite optimization: minimize f(x):=h(c(x)), where h is an infinite-valued proper convex function and c is C^2-smooth. We focus on the case…

Using tail bounds, we introduce a new probabilistic condition for function estimation in stochastic derivative-free optimization which leads to a reduction in the number of samples and eases algorithmic analyses. Moreover, we develop simple…

We present a stochastic optimization method that uses a fourth-order regularized model to find local minima of smooth and potentially non-convex objective functions with a finite-sum structure. This algorithm uses sub-sampled derivatives…

We study the classical optimization problem $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x)$ and analyze the gradient descent (GD) method in both nonconvex and convex settings. It is well-known that, under the $L$-smoothness assumption ($\|\nabla^2 f(x)\|…

Stochastic gradient descent is a canonical tool for addressing stochastic optimization problems, and forms the bedrock of modern machine learning and statistics. In this work, we seek to balance the fact that attenuating step-size is…

We propose new continuous-time formulations for first-order stochastic optimization algorithms such as mini-batch gradient descent and variance-reduced methods. We exploit these continuous-time models, together with simple Lyapunov analysis…

This work aims to solve a stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth composite optimization problem. Previous works on composite optimization problem requires the major part to satisfy Lipschitz smoothness or some relaxed smoothness conditions, which…

For solving pseudo-convex global optimization problems, we present a novel fully adaptive steepest descent method (or ASDM) without any hard-to-estimate parameters. For the step-size regulation in an $\varepsilon$-normalized direction, we…

We study a fixed step-size noisy distributed gradient descent algorithm for solving optimization problems in which the objective is a finite sum of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Random perturbations are introduced to the…

We perform the first tight convergence analysis of the gradient method with varying step sizes when applied to smooth hypoconvex (weakly convex) functions. Hypoconvex functions are smooth nonconvex functions whose curvature is bounded and…

We consider the use of a curvature-adaptive step size in gradient-based iterative methods, including quasi-Newton methods, for minimizing self-concordant functions, extending an approach first proposed for Newton's method by Nesterov. This…