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Adaptive gradient methods are workhorses in deep learning. However, the convergence guarantees of adaptive gradient methods for nonconvex optimization have not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we provide a fine-grained convergence…
This paper studies accelerated gradient methods for nonconvex optimization with Lipschitz continuous gradient and Hessian. We propose two simple accelerated gradient methods, restarted accelerated gradient descent (AGD) and restarted heavy…
In this paper, acceleration of gradient methods for convex optimization problems with weak levels of convexity and smoothness is considered. Starting from the universal fast gradient method which was designed to be an optimal method for…
This paper is concerned with convergence of stochastic gradient algorithms with momentum terms in the nonconvex setting. A class of stochastic momentum methods, including stochastic gradient descent, heavy ball, and Nesterov's accelerated…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
The paper studies a distributed gradient descent (DGD) process and considers the problem of showing that in nonconvex optimization problems, DGD typically converges to local minima rather than saddle points. The paper considers…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with adaptive steps is widely used to train deep neural networks and generative models. Most theoretical results assume that it is possible to obtain unbiased gradient estimators, which is not the case in…
We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a non-smooth convex function using proximal-gradient methods, where an error is present in the calculation of the gradient of the smooth term or in the proximity…
We show that accelerated gradient descent, averaged gradient descent and the heavy-ball method for non-strongly-convex problems may be reformulated as constant parameter second-order difference equation algorithms, where stability of the…
First-order optimization methods for nonconvex functions with Lipschitz continuous gradient and Hessian have been extensively studied. State-of-the-art methods for finding an $\varepsilon$-stationary point within $O(\varepsilon^{-{7/4}})$…
The paper considers distributed gradient flow (DGF) for multi-agent nonconvex optimization. DGF is a continuous-time approximation of distributed gradient descent that is often easier to study than its discrete-time counterpart. The paper…
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,…
Stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints have a broad range of applications in intelligent transportation, cyber-security, and smart grids. In this paper, first, we propose an inexact-proximal accelerated…
Recent work has shown that stochastically perturbed gradient methods can efficiently escape strict saddle points of smooth functions. We extend this body of work to nonsmooth optimization, by analyzing an inexact analogue of a…
Optimizing non-convex functions is of primary importance in the vast majority of machine learning algorithms. Even though many gradient descent based algorithms have been studied, successive convex approximation based algorithms have been…
A game theory inspired methodology is proposed for finding a function's saddle points. While explicit descent methods are known to have severe convergence issues, implicit methods are natural in an adversarial setting, as they take the…
Large-scale optimization problems require algorithms both effective and efficient. One such popular and proven algorithm is Stochastic Gradient Descent which uses first-order gradient information to solve these problems. This paper studies…
We propose an alternating subgradient method with non-constant step sizes for solving convex-concave saddle-point problems associated with general convex-concave functions. We assume that the sequence of our step sizes is not summable but…
We develop multi-step gradient methods for network-constrained optimization of strongly convex functions with Lipschitz-continuous gradients. Given the topology of the underlying network and bounds on the Hessian of the objective function,…
This paper is devoted to first-order algorithms for smooth convex optimization with inexact gradients. Unlike the majority of the literature on this topic, we consider the setting of relative rather than absolute inexactness. More…