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We consider minimizing a nonconvex, smooth function $f$ on a Riemannian manifold $\mathcal{M}$. We show that a perturbed version of Riemannian gradient descent algorithm converges to a second-order stationary point (and hence is able to…
Local search heuristics for non-convex optimizations are popular in applied machine learning. However, in general it is hard to guarantee that such algorithms even converge to a local minimum, due to the existence of complicated saddle…
We consider minimization of stochastic functionals that are compositions of a (potentially) non-smooth convex function $h$ and smooth function $c$ and, more generally, stochastic weakly-convex functionals. We develop a family of stochastic…
The unconstrained minimization of a sufficiently smooth objective function $f(x)$ is considered, for which derivatives up to order $p$, $p\geq 2$, are assumed to be available. An adaptive regularization algorithm is proposed that uses…
We provide a first-order oracle complexity lower bound for finding stationary points of min-max optimization problems where the objective function is smooth, nonconvex in the minimization variable, and strongly concave in the maximization…
We give a simple proof that the Frank-Wolfe algorithm obtains a stationary point at a rate of $O(1/\sqrt{t})$ on non-convex objectives with a Lipschitz continuous gradient. Our analysis is affine invariant and is the first, to the best of…
We consider non-convex stochastic optimization using first-order algorithms for which the gradient estimates may have heavy tails. We show that a combination of gradient clipping, momentum, and normalized gradient descent yields convergence…
We consider a stochastic version of the proximal point algorithm for optimization problems posed on a Hilbert space. A typical application of this is supervised learning. While the method is not new, it has not been extensively analyzed in…
We study differentiable strongly quasiconvex functions for providing new properties for algorithmic and monotonicity purposes. Furthemore, we provide insights into the decreasing behaviour of strongly quasiconvex functions, applying this…
We study stochastic zeroth-order optimization with decision-dependent distributions, where the sampling law depends on the current decision and only noisy function values are available. For the non-smooth non-convex setting, we establish an…
Sign-based stochastic methods have gained attention due to their ability to achieve robust performance despite using only the sign information for parameter updates. However, the current convergence analysis of sign-based methods relies on…
We introduce PF-AGD, the first parameter-free, deterministic, accelerated first-order method to achieve $O(\epsilon^{-5/3}\log(1/\epsilon))$ oracle complexity bound when minimizing sufficiently smooth, non-convex functions; this is the…
In this work, we develop first-order (Hessian-free) and zero-order (derivative-free) implementations of the Cubically regularized Newton method for solving general non-convex optimization problems. For that, we employ finite difference…
We propose first order algorithms for convex optimization problems where the feasible set is described by a large number of convex inequalities that is to be explored by subgradient projections. The first algorithm is an adaptation of a…
This work provides the first finite-time convergence guarantees for linearly constrained stochastic bilevel optimization using only first-order methods, requiring solely gradient information without any Hessian computations or second-order…
In the development of first-order methods for smooth (resp., composite) convex optimization problems, where smooth functions with Lipschitz continuous gradients are minimized, the gradient (resp., gradient mapping) norm becomes a…
We provide improved convergence rates for various \emph{non-smooth} optimization problems via higher-order accelerated methods. In the case of $\ell_\infty$ regression, we achieves an $O(\epsilon^{-4/5})$ iteration complexity, breaking the…
Algorithms for bilevel optimization often encounter Hessian computations, which are prohibitive in high dimensions. While recent works offer first-order methods for unconstrained bilevel problems, the constrained setting remains relatively…
This work considers minimizing a sum of convex functions, each with potentially different structure ranging from nonsmooth to smooth, Lipschitz to non-Lipschitz. Nesterov's universal fast gradient method provides an optimal black-box…
We present two first-order, sequential optimization algorithms to solve constrained optimization problems. We consider a black-box setting with a priori unknown, non-convex objective and constraint functions that have Lipschitz continuous…