Related papers: First-order Methods Almost Always Avoid Saddle Poi…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…
We introduce a generic scheme for accelerating first-order optimization methods in the sense of Nesterov, which builds upon a new analysis of the accelerated proximal point algorithm. Our approach consists of minimizing a convex objective…
In this work, we consider a time-varying stochastic saddle point problem in which the objective is revealed sequentially, and the data distribution depends on the decision variables. Problems of this type express the distributional…
The difficulty of minimizing a nonconvex function is in part explained by the presence of saddle points. This slows down optimization algorithms and impacts worst-case complexity guarantees. However, many nonconvex problems of interest…
Using an optimization algorithm to solve a machine learning problem is one of mainstreams in the field of science. In this work, we demonstrate a comprehensive comparison of some state-of-the-art first-order optimization algorithms for…
In this paper we propose a primal-dual proximal extragradient algorithm to solve the generalized Dantzig selector (GDS) estimation problem, based on a new convex-concave saddle-point (SP) reformulation. Our new formulation makes it possible…
Classical global convergence results for first-order methods rely on uniform smoothness and the \L{}ojasiewicz inequality. Motivated by properties of objective functions that arise in machine learning, we propose a non-uniform refinement of…
We consider ultraweak variational formulations for (parametrized) linear first order transport equations in time and/or space. Computationally feasible pairs of optimally stable trial and test spaces are presented, starting with a suitable…
Most of the stochastic orders for comparing random variables, considered in the literature, are afflicted with two main drawbacks: (i) lack of connex property and (ii) lack of consideration of any dependence structure between the random…
In this paper we consider solving saddle point problems using two variants of Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithms, Extra-gradient (EG) and Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) methods. We show that both of these algorithms admit a…
In this article, we study the convergence of Mirror Descent (MD) and Optimistic Mirror Descent (OMD) for saddle point problems satisfying the notion of coherence as proposed in Mertikopoulos et al. We prove convergence of OMD with exact…
The goal of policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) is to search the maximal point of its objective. However, due to the inherent non-concavity of its objective, convergence to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) can not guarantee the…
Decentralized methods to solve finite-sum minimization problems are important in many signal processing and machine learning tasks where the data is distributed over a network of nodes and raw data sharing is not permitted due to privacy…
Classical supervised learning via empirical risk (or negative log-likelihood) minimization hinges upon the assumption that the testing distribution coincides with the training distribution. This assumption can be challenged in modern…
This paper considers meta-learning problems, where there is a distribution of tasks, and we would like to obtain an agent that performs well (i.e., learns quickly) when presented with a previously unseen task sampled from this distribution.…
In the paper, we generalize the approach Gasnikov et. al, 2017, which allows to solve (stochastic) convex optimization problems with an inexact gradient-free oracle, to the convex-concave saddle-point problem. The proposed approach works,…
Machine learning problems such as neural network training, tensor decomposition, and matrix factorization, require local minimization of a nonconvex function. This local minimization is challenged by the presence of saddle points, of which…
The rapid progress in machine learning in recent years has been based on a highly productive connection to gradient-based optimization. Further progress hinges in part on a shift in focus from pattern recognition to decision-making and…
This paper considers continuously differentiable functions of two vector variables that have (possibly a continuum of) min-max saddle points. We study the asymptotic convergence properties of the associated saddle-point dynamics…
We examine the behavior of accelerated gradient methods in smooth nonconvex unconstrained optimization, focusing in particular on their behavior near strict saddle points. Accelerated methods are iterative methods that typically step along…