Related papers: Potential-Function Proofs for First-Order Methods
We show that the iterates generated by a generic first-order meta-algorithm satisfy a canonical perturbed Fenchel duality inequality. The latter in turn readily yields a unified derivation of the best known convergence rates for various…
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…
Many recent studies on first-order methods (FOMs) focus on \emph{composite non-convex non-smooth} optimization with linear and/or nonlinear function constraints. Upper (or worst-case) complexity bounds have been established for these…
Continuous DR-submodular functions are a class of functions that satisfy the Diminishing Returns (DR) property, which implies that they are concave along non-negative directions. Existing works have studied monotone continuous DR-submodular…
We provide improved convergence rates for constrained convex-concave min-max problems and monotone variational inequalities with higher-order smoothness. In min-max settings where the $p^{th}$-order derivatives are Lipschitz continuous, we…
We exploit analogies between first-order algorithms for constrained optimization and non-smooth dynamical systems to design a new class of accelerated first-order algorithms for constrained optimization. Unlike Frank-Wolfe or projected…
Lyapunov functions play a fundamental role in analyzing the stability and convergence properties of optimization methods. In this paper, we propose a novel and straightforward approach for constructing Lyapunov functions for first-order…
We establish a convergence theorem for a certain type of stochastic gradient descent, which leads to a convergent variant of the back-propagation algorithm
Gradient methods are widely used in optimization problems. In practice, while the smoothness parameter can be estimated utilizing techniques such as backtracking, estimating the strong convexity parameter remains a challenge; moreover, even…
We study alternating first-order algorithms with no inner loops for solving nonconvex-strongly-concave min-max problems. We show the convergence of the alternating gradient descent--ascent algorithm method by proposing a substantially…
First-order operator splitting methods are ubiquitous among many fields through science and engineering, such as inverse problems, signal/image processing, statistics, data science and machine learning, to name a few. In this paper, we…
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…
Classical results show that gradient descent converges linearly to minimizers of smooth strongly convex functions. A natural question is whether there exists a locally nearly linearly convergent method for nonsmooth functions with quadratic…
In a series of papers \cite{LSJR16, PP17, LPP}, it was established that some of the most commonly used first order methods almost surely (under random initializations) and with step-size being small enough, avoid strict saddle points, as…
We derive a policy gradient theorem for Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) objectives in finite-horizon Reinforcement Learning (RL), generalizing the standard policy gradient theorem and encompassing distortion-based risk objectives as…
On solving a convex-concave bilinear saddle-point problem (SPP), there have been many works studying the complexity results of first-order methods. These results are all about upper complexity bounds, which can determine at most how many…
This paper establishes the theoretical foundations of the online scaled gradient methods (OSGM), a framework that utilizes online learning to adapt stepsizes and provably accelerate first-order methods. OSGM quantifies the effectiveness of…
In this paper we use the comparison method for investigation of first order polynomial differential equations. We prove two comparison criteria for these equations. The proved criteria we use to obtain some global solvability criteria for…
Interpretation methods and their restrictions to polynomials have been deeply used to control the termination and complexity of first-order term rewrite systems. This paper extends interpretation methods to a pure higher order functional…
This paper explores goal-directed proof search in first-order multi-modal logic. The key issue is to design a proof system that respects the modularity and locality of assumptions of many modal logics. By forcing ambiguities to be…