Related papers: Using Negative Curvature in Solving Nonlinear Prog…
We consider the covariance steering problem for nonlinear control-affine systems. Our objective is to find an optimal control strategy to steer the state of a system from an initial distribution to a target one whose mean and covariance are…
The goal of this paper is to study approaches to bridge the gap between first-order and second-order type methods for composite convex programs. Our key observations are: i) Many well-known operator splitting methods, such as…
This paper presents active-set methods for minimizing nonconvex twice-continuously differentiable functions subject to bound constraints. Within the faces of the feasible set, we employ descent methods with Armijo line search, utilizing…
This letter presents a new spectral-clustering-based approach to the subspace clustering problem. Underpinning the proposed method is a convex program for optimal direction search, which for each data point d finds an optimal direction in…
This study develops a framework for a class of constant modulus (CM) optimization problems, which covers binary constraints, discrete phase constraints, semi-orthogonal matrix constraints, non-negative semi-orthogonal matrix constraints,…
The study of optimal control problems under uncertainty plays an important role in scientific numerical simulations. This class of optimization problems is strongly utilized in engineering, biology and finance. In this paper, a stochastic…
It is well-known that given a bounded, smooth nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (where the gradient norm is less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ iterations. However,…
This paper addresses the study of a new class of nonsmooth optimization problems, where the objective is represented as a difference of two generally nonconvex functions. We propose and develop a novel Newton-type algorithm to solving such…
In this paper, a sequential search method for finding the global minimum of an objective function is presented, The descent gradient search is repeated until the global minimum is obtained. The global minimum is located by a process of…
We consider online statistical inference of constrained stochastic nonlinear optimization problems. We apply the Stochastic Sequential Quadratic Programming (StoSQP) method to solve these problems, which can be regarded as applying…
Invex programs are a special kind of non-convex problems which attain global minima at every stationary point. While classical first-order gradient descent methods can solve them, they converge very slowly. In this paper, we propose new…
A sequential quadratic programming method is designed for solving general smooth nonlinear stochastic optimization problems subject to expectation equality constraints. We consider the setting where the objective and constraint function…
For solving pseudo-convex global optimization problems, we present a novel fully adaptive steepest descent method (or ASDM) without any hard-to-estimate parameters. For the step-size regulation in an $\varepsilon$-normalized direction, we…
We consider the minimization of non-convex quadratic forms regularized by a cubic term, which exhibit multiple saddle points and poor local minima. Nonetheless, we prove that, under mild assumptions, gradient descent approximates the…
Acceleration for non-convex functions is a fundamental challenge in optimisation. We revisit star-convex functions, which are strictly unimodal on all lines through a minimizer. [1] accelerate unconstrained star-convex minimization of…
We present a novel direct transcription method to solve optimization problems subject to nonlinear differential and inequality constraints. We prove convergence of our numerical method under reasonably mild assumptions: boundedness and…
We propose a general scheme for solving convex and non-convex optimization problems on manifolds. The central idea is that, by adding a multiple of the squared retraction distance to the objective function in question, we "convexify" the…
We present a simple transformation of any linear program or semidefinite program into an equivalent convex optimization problem whose only constraints are linear equations. The objective function is defined on the whole space, making…
Nonlinear programming is explicitly analyzed via a novel perspective/method and from a bottom-up manner. The philosophy is based on the recent findings on convex quadratic equation (CQE), which help clarify a geometric interpretation that…
Approximation of subdifferentials is one of the main tasks when computing descent directions for nonsmooth optimization problems. In this article, we propose a bisection method for weakly lower semismooth functions which is able to compute…