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In this paper, we propose two novel non-stationary first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems. Unlike existing primal-dual schemes where the parameters are often fixed, our methods use…
This paper considers the problem of understanding the exit time for trajectories of gradient-related first-order methods from saddle neighborhoods under some initial boundary conditions. Given the 'flat' geometry around saddle points,…
In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…
This work is on constrained large-scale non-convex optimization where the constraint set implies a manifold structure. Solving such problems is important in a multitude of fundamental machine learning tasks. Recent advances on Riemannian…
Motivated by the super-diffusivity of self-repelling random walk, which has roots in statistical physics, this paper develops a new perturbation mechanism for optimization algorithms. In this mechanism, perturbations are adapted to the…
Stochastic optimization is fundamental to modern machine learning. Recent research has extended the study of stochastic first-order methods (SFOMs) from light-tailed to heavy-tailed noise, which frequently arises in practice, with clipping…
Stochastic gradients for deep neural networks exhibit strong correlations along the optimization trajectory, and are often aligned with a small set of Hessian eigenvectors associated with outlier eigenvalues. Recent work shows that…
Quasi-Newton methods refer to a class of algorithms at the interface between first and second order methods. They aim to progress as substantially as second order methods per iteration, while maintaining the computational complexity of…
In this paper, we design and analyze a new family of adaptive subgradient methods for solving an important class of weakly convex (possibly nonsmooth) stochastic optimization problems. Adaptive methods that use exponential moving averages…
An algorithm based on the interior-point methodology for solving continuous nonlinearly constrained optimization problems is proposed, analyzed, and tested. The distinguishing feature of the algorithm is that it presumes that only noisy…
We propose an efficient algorithm for finding first-order Nash equilibria in min-max problems of the form $\min_{x \in X}\max_{y\in Y} F(x,y)$, where the objective function is smooth in both variables and concave with respect to $y$; the…
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 study smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization problems, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions. We assume access to noisy evaluations of the functions and their gradients,…
Recent focus on robustness to adversarial attacks for deep neural networks produced a large variety of algorithms for training robust models. Most of the effective algorithms involve solving the min-max optimization problem for training…
While first-order stationary points (FOSPs) are the traditional targets of non-convex optimization, they often correspond to undesirable strict saddle points. To circumvent this, attention has shifted towards second-order stationary points…
While the superior performance of second-order optimization methods such as Newton's method is well known, they are hardly used in practice for deep learning because neither assembling the Hessian matrix nor calculating its inverse is…
Quasi-Newton methods are widely used in practise for convex loss minimization problems. These methods exhibit good empirical performance on a wide variety of tasks and enjoy super-linear convergence to the optimal solution. For large-scale…
We show that, for finite-sum minimization problems, incorporating partial second-order information of the objective function can dramatically improve the robustness to mini-batch size of variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods, making…
In many real-world applications, optimization problems evolve continuously over time and are often subject to stochastic noise. We consider a stochastic time-varying optimization problem in which the objective function $f(x;t)$ changes…
Gradient-free/zeroth-order methods for black-box convex optimization have been extensively studied in the last decade with the main focus on oracle calls complexity. In this paper, besides the oracle complexity, we focus also on iteration…