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We provide tight upper and lower bounds on the complexity of minimizing the average of $m$ convex functions using gradient and prox oracles of the component functions. We show a significant gap between the complexity of deterministic vs…
Bilevel optimization minimizes an objective function, defined by an upper-level problem whose feasible region is the solution of a lower-level problem. We study the oracle complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point with…
On solving a convex-concave bilinear saddle-point problem (SPP), there have been many works studying the complexity results of first-order methods. These results are all about upper complexity bounds, which can determine at most how many…
Many practical optimization problems lack strong convexity. Fortunately, recent studies have revealed that first-order algorithms also enjoy linear convergences under various weaker regularity conditions. While the relationship among…
We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite…
This paper is devoted to the design of efficient primal-dual algorithm (PDA) for solving convex optimization problems with known saddle-point structure. We present a new PDA with larger acceptable range of parameters and correction, which…
Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…
We construct a family of functions suitable for establishing lower bounds on the oracle complexity of first-order minimization of smooth strongly-convex functions. Based on this construction, we derive new lower bounds on the complexity of…
We study the optimal lower and upper complexity bounds for finding approximate solutions to the composite problem $\min_x\ f(x)+h(Ax-b)$, where $f$ is smooth and $h$ is convex. Given access to the proximal operator of $h$, for strongly…
We study the iteration complexity of the optimistic gradient descent-ascent (OGDA) method and the extra-gradient (EG) method for finding a saddle point of a convex-concave unconstrained min-max problem. To do so, we first show that both…
Many recent studies on first-order methods (FOMs) focus on \emph{composite non-convex non-smooth} optimization with linear and/or nonlinear function constraints. Upper (or worst-case) complexity bounds have been established for these…
This paper presents new first-order methods for achieving optimal oracle complexities in convex optimization with convex functional constraints. Oracle complexities are measured by the number of function and gradient evaluations. To achieve…
Principal component analysis (PCA) requires the computation of a low-rank approximation to a matrix containing the data being analyzed. In many applications of PCA, the best possible accuracy of any rank-deficient approximation is at most a…
We propose a family of recursive cutting-plane algorithms to solve feasibility problems with constrained memory, which can also be used for first-order convex optimization. Precisely, in order to find a point within a ball of radius…
We establish the first tight lower bound of $\Omega(\log\log\kappa)$ on the query complexity of sampling from the class of strongly log-concave and log-smooth distributions with condition number $\kappa$ in one dimension. Whereas existing…
We study the question of whether parallelization in the exploration of the feasible set can be used to speed up convex optimization, in the local oracle model of computation. We show that the answer is negative for both deterministic and…
In many applications that require matrix solutions of minimal rank, the underlying cost function is non-convex leading to an intractable, NP-hard optimization problem. Consequently, the convex nuclear norm is frequently used as a surrogate…
In many applications that require matrix solutions of minimal rank, the underlying cost function is non-convex leading to an intractable, NP-hard optimization problem. Consequently, the convex nuclear norm is frequently used as a surrogate…
A landmark result of non-smooth convex optimization is that gradient descent is an optimal algorithm whenever the number of computed gradients is smaller than the dimension $d$. In this paper we study the extension of this result to the…
Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ oracle complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary…