Related papers: Convex Optimization with Unbounded Nonconvex Oracl…
Optimization problems under affine constraints appear in various areas of machine learning. We consider the task of minimizing a smooth strongly convex function F(x) under the affine constraint Kx=b, with an oracle providing evaluations of…
In this paper, we study the problem of noisy, convex, zeroth order optimisation of a function $f$ over a bounded convex set $\bar{\mathcal X}\subset \mathbb{R}^d$. Given a budget $n$ of noisy queries to the function $f$ that can be…
We study the simulated annealing algorithm based on the kinetic Langevin dynamics, in order to find the global minimum of a non-convex potential function. For both the continuous time formulation and a discrete time analogue, we obtain the…
In this paper we propose a modified version of the simulated annealing algorithm for solving a stochastic global optimization problem. More precisely, we address the problem of finding a global minimizer of a function with noisy…
We consider the problem of optimizing an approximately convex function over a bounded convex set in $\mathbb{R}^n$ using only function evaluations. The problem is reduced to sampling from an \emph{approximately} log-concave distribution…
In this paper, we consider the generalised (higher order) Langevin equation for the purpose of simulated annealing and optimisation of nonconvex functions. Our approach modifies the underdamped Langevin equation by replacing the Brownian…
We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of…
The paper considers a distributed algorithm for global minimization of a nonconvex function. The algorithm is a first-order consensus + innovations type algorithm that incorporates decaying additive Gaussian noise for annealing, converging…
We study the problem of minimizing a convex function on a nonempty, finite subset of the integer lattice when the function cannot be evaluated at noninteger points. We propose a new underestimator that does not require access to…
In this paper, we address the problem of minimizing a convex function f over a convex set, with the extra constraint that some variables must be integer. This problem, even when f is a piecewise linear function, is NP-hard. We study an…
Deep learning applications require global optimization of non-convex objective functions, which have multiple local minima. The same problem is often found in physical simulations and may be resolved by the methods of Langevin dynamics with…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function. These upper bounds are tight at the current estimate, and each iteration monotonically drives the objective…
We consider minimizing an objective function subject to constraints defined by the intersection of lower-level sets of convex functions. We study two cases: (i) strongly convex and Lipschitz-smooth objective function and (ii) convex but…
In this paper we consider non-smooth convex optimization problems with (possibly) infinite intersection of constraints. In contrast to the classical approach, where the constraints are usually represented as intersection of simple sets,…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…
This paper considers minimax optimization $\min_x \max_y f(x, y)$ in the challenging setting where $f$ can be both nonconvex in $x$ and nonconcave in $y$. Though such optimization problems arise in many machine learning paradigms including…
Min-max problems have broad applications in machine learning, including learning with non-decomposable loss and learning with robustness to data distribution. Convex-concave min-max problem is an active topic of research with efficient…
We study how to safely control nonlinear control-affine systems that are corrupted with bounded non-stochastic noise, i.e., noise that is unknown a priori and that is not necessarily governed by a stochastic model. We focus on safety…
This paper studies simple bilevel problems, where a convex upper-level function is minimized over the optimal solutions of a convex lower-level problem. We first show the fundamental difficulty of simple bilevel problems, that the…
Convex optimization with sparsity-promoting convex regularization is a standard approach for estimating sparse signals in noise. In order to promote sparsity more strongly than convex regularization, it is also standard practice to employ…