Related papers: Natasha: Faster Non-Convex Stochastic Optimization…
Non-smoothness at optimal points is a common phenomenon in many eigenvalue optimization problems. We consider two recent algorithms to minimize the largest eigenvalue of a Hermitian matrix dependent on one parameter, both proven to be…
In convex optimization, the problem of finding near-stationary points has not been adequately studied yet, unlike other optimality measures such as the function value. Even in the deterministic case, the optimal method (OGM-G, due to Kim…
This paper presents smoothing schemes for obtaining approximate stationary points of unconstrained or linearly-constrained composite nonconvex-concave min-max (and hence nonsmooth) problems by applying well-known algorithms to composite…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…
We propose a quasi-Newton-type method for nonconvex optimization with Lipschitz continuous gradients and Hessians. The algorithm finds an $\varepsilon$-stationary point within $\tilde{\mathrm{O}}(d^{1/4} \varepsilon^{-13/8})$ gradient…
This paper studies the stochastic nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax optimization over a multi-agent network. We propose an efficient algorithm, called Decentralized Recursive gradient descEnt Ascent Method (DREAM), which achieves the…
Finding approximate stationary points, i.e., points where the gradient is approximately zero, of non-convex but smooth objective functions $f$ over unrestricted $d$-dimensional domains is one of the most fundamental problems in classical…
Non-convex optimization is a critical tool in advancing machine learning, especially for complex models like deep neural networks and support vector machines. Despite challenges such as multiple local minima and saddle points, non-convex…
We develop a family of accelerated stochastic algorithms that minimize sums of convex functions. Our algorithms improve upon the fastest running time for empirical risk minimization (ERM), and in particular linear least-squares regression,…
Most approximation methods in high dimensions exploit smoothness of the function being approximated. These methods provide poor convergence results for non-smooth functions with kinks. For example, such kinks can arise in the uncertainty…
We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function given quantum access to a stochastic gradient oracle. We provide two new methods for the special case of minimizing a Lipschitz convex function. Each method obtains a dimension…
The problem of minimizing sum-of-nonconvex functions (i.e., convex functions that are average of non-convex ones) is becoming increasingly important in machine learning, and is the core machinery for PCA, SVD, regularized Newton's method,…
We study the problem of minimizing a $m$-weakly convex and possibly nonsmooth function. Weak convexity provides a broad framework that subsumes convex, smooth, and many composite nonconvex functions. In this work, we propose a…
We study constrained nested stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function is a composition of two smooth functions whose exact values and derivatives are not available. We propose a single time-scale stochastic…
In this paper, we propose a proximal stochasitc gradient algorithm (PSGA) for solving composite optimization problems by incorporating variance reduction techniques and an adaptive step-size strategy. In the PSGA method, the objective…
Optimization algorithms and Monte Carlo sampling algorithms have provided the computational foundations for the rapid growth in applications of statistical machine learning in recent years. There is, however, limited theoretical…
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…
We propose a unifying algorithm for non-smooth non-convex optimization. The algorithm approximates the objective function by a convex model function and finds an approximate (Bregman) proximal point of the convex model. This approximate…
Smooth finite-sum optimization has been widely studied in both convex and nonconvex settings. However, existing lower bounds for finite-sum optimization are mostly limited to the setting where each component function is (strongly) convex,…
In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…