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This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and…
A power system unit commitment (UC) problem considering uncertainties of renewable energy sources is investigated in this paper, through a distributionally robust optimization approach. We assume that the first and second order moments of…
Local SGD is a promising approach to overcome the communication overhead in distributed learning by reducing the synchronization frequency among worker nodes. Despite the recent theoretical advances of local SGD in empirical risk…
We propose a novel methodology for solving a two-stage adjustable robust convex optimisation problem with a general (proximable) convex objective function and constraints defined by sum-of-squares (SOS) convex polynomials. These problems…
We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle point problems assuming we have access to unbiased stochastic estimates of the gradients. We propose a stochastic accelerated primal-dual (SAPD) algorithm and show that SAPD sequence,…
We present experimental work on a primal-dual framework simultaneously approximating maximum cut and weighted fractional cut-covering instances. In this primal-dual framework, we solve a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation to either…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…
Stochastic nonconvex-concave min-max saddle point problems appear in many machine learning and control problems including distributionally robust optimization, generative adversarial networks, and adversarial learning. In this paper, we…
This paper investigates numerical methods for solving stochastic linear quadratic (SLQ) optimal control problems governed by stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). Two distinct approaches, the open-loop and closed-loop ones, are…
The combinatorial problem Max-Cut has become a benchmark in the evaluation of local search heuristics for both quantum and classical optimisers. In contrast to local search, which only provides average-case performance guarantees, the…
We study the problem of differentially-private (DP) stochastic (convex-concave) saddle-points in the $\ell_1$ setting. We propose $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-DP algorithms based on stochastic mirror descent that attain nearly…
In this paper, we present novel randomized algorithms for solving saddle point problems whose dual feasible region is given by the direct product of many convex sets. Our algorithms can achieve an ${\cal O}(1/N)$ and ${\cal O}(1/N^2)$ rate…
Deciding whether saddle points exist or are approximable for nonconvex-nonconcave problems is usually intractable. This paper takes a step towards understanding a broad class of nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problems that do remain…
We consider the minimization of non-convex functions that typically arise in machine learning. Specifically, we focus our attention on a variant of trust region methods known as cubic regularization. This approach is particularly attractive…
Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is state of the art in large scale distributed training. The scheme can reach a linear speedup with respect to the number of workers, but this is rarely seen in practice as the scheme often…
Stochastic gradient descent ascent (SGDA) and its variants have been the workhorse for solving minimax problems. However, in contrast to the well-studied stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with differential privacy (DP) constraints, there is…
For solving large-scale non-convex problems, we propose inexact variants of trust region and adaptive cubic regularization methods, which, to increase efficiency, incorporate various approximations. In particular, in addition to approximate…
We revisit the classical problem of finding an approximately stationary point of the average of $n$ smooth and possibly nonconvex functions. The optimal complexity of stochastic first-order methods in terms of the number of gradient…
In this paper, we study the gradient descent-ascent method for convex-concave saddle-point problems. We derive a new non-asymptotic global convergence rate in terms of distance to the solution set by using the semidefinite programming…
High-dimensional Kronecker-structured estimation faces a conflict between non-convex scaling ambiguities and statistical robustness. The arbitrary factor scaling distorts gradient magnitudes, rendering standard fixed-threshold robust…