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Entropy regularization has been widely used in policy optimization algorithms to enhance exploration and the robustness of the optimal control; however it also introduces an additional regularization bias. This work quantifies the impact of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-25 Deven Sethi , David Šiška , Yufei Zhang

This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Srujan Teja Thomdapu , Harshvardhan , Ketan Rajawat

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-08-11 Lorenzo Rosasco , Silvia Villa , Bang Công Vũ

The constrained gradient method (CGM) has recently been proposed to solve convex optimization and monotone variational inequality (VI) problems with general functional constraints. While existing literature has established convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-24 Danqing Zhou , Hongmei Chen , Shiqian Ma , Junfeng Yang

The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-19 Xiaoyu Wang , Sindri Magnússon , Mikael Johansson

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-12-02 Mark Schmidt , Nicolas Le Roux , Francis Bach

This paper concerns a new class of discontinuous dynamical systems for constrained optimization. These dynamics are particularly suited to solve nonlinear, non-convex problems in closed-loop with a physical system. Such approaches using…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-11 Adrian Hauswirth , Florian Dörfler , Andrew Teel

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2011-07-01 Qihang Lin , Xi Chen , Javier Pena

We consider stochastic convex optimization problems, where several machines act asynchronously in parallel while sharing a common memory. We propose a robust training method for the constrained setting and derive non asymptotic convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Rotem Zamir Aviv , Ido Hakimi , Assaf Schuster , Kfir Y. Levy

The paper considers the problem of network-based computation of global minima in smooth nonconvex optimization problems. It is known that distributed gradient-descent-type algorithms can achieve convergence to the set of global minima by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-24 Brian Swenson , Anirudh Sridhar , H. Vincent Poor

We consider the gradient (or steepest) descent method with exact line search applied to a strongly convex function with Lipschitz continuous gradient. We establish the exact worst-case rate of convergence of this scheme, and show that this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-09-16 Etienne de Klerk , François Glineur , Adrien B. Taylor

Recently, several studies consider the stochastic optimization problem but in a heavy-tailed noise regime, i.e., the difference between the stochastic gradient and the true gradient is assumed to have a finite $p$-th moment (say being upper…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-23 Zijian Liu , Zhengyuan Zhou

Gradient clipping has long been considered essential for ensuring the convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the presence of heavy-tailed gradient noise. In this paper, we revisit this belief and explore whether gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Tao Sun , Xinwang Liu , Kun Yuan

This paper addresses the gradient flow -- the continuous-time representation of the gradient method -- with the smooth approximation of a non-differentiable objective function and presents convergence analysis framework. Similar to the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-08 Mitsuru Toyoda , Akatsuki Nishioka , Mirai Tanaka

This paper proposes a thorough theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with non-increasing step sizes. First, we show that the recursion defining SGD can be provably approximated by solutions of a time inhomogeneous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-02 Xavier Fontaine , Valentin De Bortoli , Alain Durmus

In nonsmooth optimization, a negative subgradient is not necessarily a descent direction, making the design of convergent descent methods based on zeroth-order and first-order information a challenging task. The well-studied bundle methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-13 Hanyang Li , Ying Cui

Studying the properties of stochastic noise to optimize complex non-convex functions has been an active area of research in the field of machine learning. Prior work has shown that the noise of stochastic gradient descent improves…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-20 Aurelien Lucchi , Frank Proske , Antonio Orvieto , Francis Bach , Hans Kersting

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-16 Alberto Bietti , Julien Mairal

Optimization problems occurring in a wide variety of physical design problems, including but not limited to optical engineering, quantum control, structural engineering, involve minimization of a simple cost function of the state of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-05 Rahul Trivedi

This article derives lower bounds on the convergence rate of continuous-time gradient-based optimization algorithms. The algorithms are subjected to a time-normalization constraint that avoids a reparametrization of time in order to make…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-04 Michael Muehlebach , Michael I. Jordan