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We deal with the problem of gradient estimation for stochastic differentiable relaxations of algorithms, operators, simulators, and other non-differentiable functions. Stochastic smoothing conventionally perturbs the input of a…
This paper studies some asymptotic properties of adaptive algorithms widely used in optimization and machine learning, and among them Adagrad and Rmsprop, which are involved in most of the blackbox deep learning algorithms. Our setup is the…
This paper studies a structured compound stochastic program (SP) involving multiple expectations coupled by nonconvex and nonsmooth functions. We present a successive convex-programming based sampling algorithm and establish its…
The generalized smooth condition, $(L_{0},L_{1})$-smoothness, has triggered people's interest since it is more realistic in many optimization problems shown by both empirical and theoretical evidence. Two recent works established the…
The paper considers the problem of network-based computation of global minima in smooth nonconvex optimization problems. It is known that distributed gradient-descent-type algorithms can achieve convergence to the set of global minima by…
In this paper, we consider the minimization of a nonsmooth nonconvex objective function $f(x)$ over a closed convex subset $\mathcal{X}$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, with additional nonsmooth nonconvex constraints $c(x) = 0$. We develop a unified…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of an average function of a large number of smooth convex components and a general, possibly non-differentiable, convex function. Although many methods have been proposed to solve this problem…
An adaptive regularization algorithm using inexact function and derivatives evaluations is proposed for the solution of composite nonsmooth nonconvex optimization. It is shown that this algorithm needs at most…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of three convex functions: i) a smooth function $f$ in the form of an expectation or a finite average, ii) a non-smooth function $g$ in the form of a finite average of proximable functions…
In this paper we propose a generalized condition for a sharp minimum, somewhat similar to the inexact oracle proposed recently by Devolder-Glineur-Nesterov. The proposed approach makes it possible to extend the class of applicability of…
We propose a variable metric framework for minimizing the sum of a self-concordant function and a possibly non-smooth convex function, endowed with an easily computable proximal operator. We theoretically establish the convergence of our…
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…
The nonlinear conjugate gradient methods are known to be an effective approach for standard unconstrained optimization problems especially for large-scale problems. This paper proposes a proximal nonlinear conjugate gradient method, which…
In this paper, we consider a class of nonconvex and nonsmooth fractional programming problems, that involve the sum of a convex, possibly nonsmooth function composed with a linear operator and a differentiable, possibly nonconvex function…
We present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…
Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
Classical analysis of convex and non-convex optimization methods often requires the Lipshitzness of the gradient, which limits the analysis to functions bounded by quadratics. Recent work relaxed this requirement to a non-uniform smoothness…
We investigate the stochastic optimization problem of minimizing population risk, where the loss defining the risk is assumed to be weakly convex. Compositions of Lipschitz convex functions with smooth maps are the primary examples of such…
While many distributed optimization algorithms have been proposed for solving smooth or convex problems over the networks, few of them can handle non-convex and non-smooth problems. Based on a proximal primal-dual approach, this paper…