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Online and stochastic gradient methods have emerged as potent tools in large scale optimization with both smooth convex and nonsmooth convex problems from the classes $C^{1,1}(\reals^p)$ and $C^{1,0}(\reals^p)$ respectively. However to our…
Discrete gradients (DG) or more exactly discrete gradient methods are time integration schemes that are custom-built to preserve first integrals or Lyapunov functions of a given ordinary differential equation (ODE). In conservative…
We study the worst-case convergence rates of the proximal gradient method for minimizing the sum of a smooth strongly convex function and a non-smooth convex function whose proximal operator is available. We establish the exact worst-case…
This paper concerns an optimization algorithm for unconstrained non-convex problems where the objective function has sparse connections between the unknowns. The algorithm is based on applying a dissipation preserving numerical integrator,…
We propose an optimization proxy in terms of iterative implicit gradient methods for solving constrained optimization problems with nonconvex loss functions. This framework can be applied to a broad range of machine learning settings,…
Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…
Recently, there has been growing interest in developing optimization methods for solving large-scale machine learning problems. Most of these problems boil down to the problem of minimizing an average of a finite set of smooth and strongly…
We describe a novel constructive technique for devising efficient first-order methods for a wide range of large-scale convex minimization settings, including smooth, non-smooth, and strongly convex minimization. The technique builds upon a…
We study first-order optimization methods obtained by discretizing ordinary differential equations (ODEs) corresponding to Nesterov's accelerated gradient methods (NAGs) and Polyak's heavy-ball method. We consider three discretization…
Higher-order tensor methods were recently proposed for minimizing smooth convex and nonconvex functions. Higher-order algorithms accelerate the convergence of the classical first-order methods thanks to the higher-order derivatives used in…
This paper proposes a novel proximal-gradient algorithm for a decentralized optimization problem with a composite objective containing smooth and non-smooth terms. Specifically, the smooth and nonsmooth terms are dealt with by gradient and…
We investigate an inertial algorithm of gradient type in connection with the minimization of a nonconvex differentiable function. The algorithm is formulated in the spirit of Nesterov's accelerated convex gradient method. We prove some…
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…
We study gradient-based optimization methods obtained by directly discretizing a second-order ordinary differential equation (ODE) related to the continuous limit of Nesterov's accelerated gradient method. When the function is smooth…
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…
We analyze the complexity of biased stochastic gradient methods (SGD), where individual updates are corrupted by deterministic, i.e. biased error terms. We derive convergence results for smooth (non-convex) functions and give improved rates…
In this paper, we consider gradient-type methods for convex positively homogeneous optimization problems with relative accuracy. An analogue of the accelerated universal gradient-type method for positively homogeneous optimization problems…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
Due to its applications in many different places in machine learning and other connected engineering applications, the problem of minimization of a smooth function that satisfies the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz condition receives much attention…