Related papers: Gradient descent with nonconvex constraints: local…

Non-convex optimization with local search heuristics has been widely used in machine learning, achieving many state-of-art results. It becomes increasingly important to understand why they can work for these NP-hard problems on typical…

Stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) has gained the attention of optimization researchers due to its global optimization properties. This paper proves an improved convergence property to local minimizers of nonconvex objective…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…

This paper theoretically reanalyzes the convergence of the mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for a structured minimization problem involving a finite-sum function with its gradient being stochastically approximated, and an…

In this paper, we consider the problem of distributed online convex optimization, where a network of local agents aim to jointly optimize a convex function over a period of multiple time steps. The agents do not have any information about…

This paper considers a distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problem, where the nodes in a network cooperatively minimize a sum of $L$-smooth local cost functions with sparse gradients. By adaptively adjusting the stepsizes…

We consider solving nonconvex composite optimization problems in which the sum of a smooth function and a nonsmooth function is minimized. Many of convergence analyses of proximal gradient-type methods rely on global descent property…

Extrapolation is a well-known technique for solving convex optimization and variational inequalities and recently attracts some attention for non-convex optimization. Several recent works have empirically shown its success in some machine…

This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…

The article discusses distributed gradient-descent algorithms for computing local and global minima in nonconvex optimization. For local optimization, we focus on distributed stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD)--a simple network-based…

We study the learning performance of gradient descent when the empirical risk is weakly convex, namely, the smallest negative eigenvalue of the empirical risk's Hessian is bounded in magnitude. By showing that this eigenvalue can control…

Modern statistical inference tasks often require iterative optimization methods to compute the solution. Convergence analysis from an optimization viewpoint only informs us how well the solution is approximated numerically but overlooks the…

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…

Fitting a function by using linear combinations of a large number $N$ of `simple' components is one of the most fruitful ideas in statistical learning. This idea lies at the core of a variety of methods, from two-layer neural networks to…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been studied extensively over the past decades due to its simplicity and broad applicability in machine learning. In this work, we analyze the local behavior of gradient descent and stochastic gradient…

We consider the classical gradient descent algorithm with constant stepsizes, where some error is introduced in the computation of each gradient. More specifically, we assume some relative bound on the inexactness, in the sense that the…

This paper is devoted to the theoretical and numerical investigation of an augmented Lagrangian method for the solution of optimization problems with geometric constraints. Specifically, we study situations where parts of the constraints…

As science and engineering have become increasingly data-driven, the role of optimization has expanded to touch almost every stage of the data analysis pipeline, from signal and data acquisition to modeling and prediction. The optimization…

In this paper, we propose a new way to obtain optimal convergence rates for smooth stochastic (strong) convex optimization tasks. Our approach is based on results for optimization tasks where gradients have nonrandom noise. In contrast to…

In recent years, important progress has been made in applying methods and techniques of convex optimization to many fields of applications such as location science, engineering, computational statistics, and computer science. In this paper,…