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The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…

The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…

In this paper, we introduce various mechanisms to obtain accelerated first-order stochastic optimization algorithms when the objective function is convex or strongly convex. Specifically, we extend the Catalyst approach originally designed…

We are concerned with a class of nonconvex and nonsmooth composite optimization problems, comprising a twice differentiable function and a prox-regular function. We establish a sufficient condition for the proximal mapping of a prox-regular…

An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…

In this paper we consider convex optimization problems with stochastic composite objective function subject to (possibly) infinite intersection of constraints. The objective function is expressed in terms of expectation operator over a sum…

We present a stochastic setting for optimization problems with nonsmooth convex separable objective functions over linear equality constraints. To solve such problems, we propose a stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers…

We introduce a new approach to develop stochastic optimization algorithms for a class of stochastic composite and possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The main idea is to combine two stochastic estimators to create a new hybrid one. We…

We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…

This paper studies a stochastic algorithm for linearly constrained nonconvex optimization, where the objective function is smooth but only unbiased stochastic gradients with bounded variance are available. We propose a momentum-based…

We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…

We consider minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function using a stochastic Newton method. At each iteration, the algorithm is given an oracle access to a stochastic estimate of the Hessian matrix. The oracle model includes…

We develop an implementable stochastic proximal point (SPP) method for a class of weakly convex, composite optimization problems. The proposed stochastic proximal point algorithm incorporates a variance reduction mechanism and the resulting…

There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…

The goal of this paper is to study approaches to bridge the gap between first-order and second-order type methods for composite convex programs. Our key observations are: i) Many well-known operator splitting methods, such as…

Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…

Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…

In this work, we develop new optimization algorithms that use approximate second-order information combined with the gradient regularization technique to achieve fast global convergence rates for both convex and non-convex objectives. The…

In this paper we consider stochastic composite convex optimization problems with the objective function satisfying a stochastic bounded gradient condition, with or without a quadratic functional growth property. These models include the…

Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…