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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…
We consider decentralized time-varying stochastic optimization problems where each of the functions held by the nodes has a finite sum structure. Such problems can be efficiently solved using variance reduction techniques. Our aim is to…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
The problem of minimizing sum-of-nonconvex functions (i.e., convex functions that are average of non-convex ones) is becoming increasingly important in machine learning, and is the core machinery for PCA, SVD, regularized Newton's method,…
We study a class of non-convex and non-smooth problems with \textit{rank} regularization to promote sparsity in optimal solution. We propose to apply the proximal gradient descent method to solve the problem and accelerate the process with…
Stochastic Variance-Reduced Cubic regularization (SVRC) algorithms have received increasing attention due to its improved gradient/Hessian complexities (i.e., number of queries to stochastic gradient/Hessian oracles) to find local minima…
We consider the stochastic nested composition optimization problem where the objective is a composition of two expected-value functions. We proposed the stochastic ADMM to solve this complicated objective. In order to find an $\epsilon$…
Stochastic majorization-minimization (SMM) is a class of stochastic optimization algorithms that proceed by sampling new data points and minimizing a recursive average of surrogate functions of an objective function. The surrogates are…
This paper proposes a constrained stochastic successive convex approximation (CSSCA) algorithm to find a stationary point for a general non-convex stochastic optimization problem, whose objective and constraint functions are non-convex and…
We propose a new stochastic proximal quasi-Newton method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions in the particular context that one of the functions is the average of a large number of smooth functions and the other one is nonsmooth.…
We develop and analyze stochastic optimization algorithms for problems in which the expected loss is strongly convex, and the optimum is (approximately) sparse. Previous approaches are able to exploit only one of these two structures,…
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the…
We study the problem of finding a near-stationary point for smooth minimax optimization. The recently proposed extra anchored gradient (EAG) methods achieve the optimal convergence rate for the convex-concave minimax problem in the…
We study constrained nested stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function is a composition of two smooth functions whose exact values and derivatives are not available. We propose a single time-scale stochastic…
We design accelerated algorithms with improved rates for several fundamental classes of optimization problems. Our algorithms all build upon techniques related to the analysis of primal-dual extragradient methods via relative Lipschitzness…
In decentralized learning, a network of nodes cooperate to minimize an overall objective function that is usually the finite-sum of their local objectives, and incorporates a non-smooth regularization term for the better generalization…
Optimization algorithms are pivotal in advancing various scientific and industrial fields but often encounter obstacles such as trapping in local minima, saddle points, and plateaus (flat regions), which makes the convergence to reasonable…
Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large-scale machine learning problems, by virtue of its light complexity per iteration. However, it lags behind its non-stochastic counterparts with respect to the convergence rate,…
In this paper, we propose a new SVRG-style acceleated stochastic algorithm for solving a family of non-convex optimization problems whose objective consists of a sum of $n$ smooth functions and a non-smooth convex function. Our major goal…
In recent centralized nonconvex distributed learning and federated learning, local methods are one of the promising approaches to reduce communication time. However, existing work has mainly focused on studying first-order optimality…