Related papers: Convergence guarantees for a class of non-convex a…
Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…
We consider the task of decentralized minimization of the sum of smooth strongly convex functions stored across the nodes of a network. For this problem, lower bounds on the number of gradient computations and the number of communication…
Functional constrained optimization is becoming more and more important in machine learning and operations research. Such problems have potential applications in risk-averse machine learning, semisupervised learning, and robust optimization…
Composite minimization involves a collection of functions which are aggregated in a nonsmooth manner. It covers, as a particular case, smooth approximation of minimax games, minimization of max-type functions, and simple composite…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
We propose a new family of subgradient- and gradient-based methods which converges with optimal complexity for convex optimization problems whose feasible region is simple enough. This includes cases where the objective function is…
We propose a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method that can incorporate adaptive sampling for stochastic nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems with upper-C^2 objectives. Upper-$\Ctwo$ functions can be viewed as…
In this paper, we focus on the problem of minimizing the sum of a nonconvex differentiable function and a DC (Difference of Convex functions) function, where the differentiable function is not restricted to the global Lipschitz gradient…
The paper considers distributed gradient flow (DGF) for multi-agent nonconvex optimization. DGF is a continuous-time approximation of distributed gradient descent that is often easier to study than its discrete-time counterpart. The paper…
Generalized and Simulated Method of Moments are often used to estimate structural Economic models. Yet, it is commonly reported that optimization is challenging because the corresponding objective function is non-convex. For smooth…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function over the intersection of finitely many simple sets which are easy to project onto. This is an important problem arising in various domains such as machine learning. The main difficulty…
We present a blended conditional gradient approach for minimizing a smooth convex function over a polytope P, combining the Frank--Wolfe algorithm (also called conditional gradient) with gradient-based steps, different from away steps and…
We propose inertial versions of block coordinate descent methods for solving non-convex non-smooth composite optimization problems. Our methods possess three main advantages compared to current state-of-the-art accelerated first-order…
We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…
In this paper, we consider a class of structured nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems, in which the objective function is formed by the sum of a possibly nonsmooth nonconvex function and a differentiable function whose gradient is…
In this two-part paper, we propose a general algorithmic framework for the minimization of a nonconvex smooth function subject to nonconvex smooth constraints. The algorithm solves a sequence of (separable) strongly convex problems and…
We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite…
We show that computing even very coarse approximations of critical points is intractable for simple classes of nonconvex functions. More concretely, we prove that if there exists a polynomial-time algorithm that takes as input a polynomial…
We consider the problem of finding local minimizers in non-convex and non-smooth optimization. Under the assumption of strict saddle points, positive results have been derived for first-order methods. We present the first known results for…
In this paper, we minimize the self-centered smoothed gap, a recently introduced optimality measure, in order to solve convex-concave saddle point problems. The self-centered smoothed gap can be computed as the sum of a convex, possibly…