Related papers: SPIDER: Near-Optimal Non-Convex Optimization via S…
Zero-order (ZO) optimization is a powerful tool for dealing with realistic constraints. On the other hand, the gradient-tracking (GT) technique proved to be an efficient method for distributed optimization aiming to achieve consensus.…
Optimal experimental design (OED) seeks experiments expected to yield the most useful data for some purpose. In practical circumstances where experiments are time-consuming or resource-intensive, OED can yield enormous savings. We pursue…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used optimization methods for parallel and distributed processing of large datasets. One of the key limitations of distributed SGD is the need to regularly communicate the…
Stochastic gradient methods have been a popular and powerful choice of optimization methods, aimed at minimizing functions. Their advantage lies in the fact that that one approximates the gradient as opposed to using the full Jacobian…
In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that only stochastic information of the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…
We devise new algorithms for the single-source shortest paths (SSSP) problem with non-negative edge weights in the CONGEST model of distributed computing. While close-to-optimal solutions, in terms of the number of rounds spent by the…
In this paper, we propose a distributed stochastic second-order proximal method that enables agents in a network to cooperatively minimize the sum of their local loss functions without any centralized coordination. The proposed algorithm,…
Motivated, in particular, by the entropy-regularized optimal transport problem, we consider convex optimization problems with linear equality constraints, where the dual objective has Lipschitz $p$-th order derivatives, and develop two…
We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…
In this work, we consider a distributed multi-agent stochastic optimization problem, where each agent holds a local objective function that is smooth and convex, and that is subject to a stochastic process. The goal is for all agents to…
In this paper, we proposed a new technique, {\em variance controlled stochastic gradient} (VCSG), to improve the performance of the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithm. To avoid over-reducing the variance of gradient by…
This paper studies the complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point for stochastic bilevel optimization when the upper-level problem is nonconvex and the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent work proposed the first-order…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function that is evolving according to unknown and possibly stochastic dynamics, which may depend jointly on time and on the decision variable itself. Such problems abound in the machine…
In this work, we present an efficient gradient projection method for solving a class of stochastic optimal control problem with expected integral state constraint. The first order optimality condition system consisting of forward-backward…
Differentially private (DP) stochastic convex optimization (SCO) is a fundamental problem, where the goal is to approximately minimize the population risk with respect to a convex loss function, given a dataset of $n$ i.i.d. samples from a…
We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…
Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…
This paper considers the distributed convex-concave minimax optimization under the second-order similarity. We propose stochastic variance-reduced optimistic gradient sliding (SVOGS) method, which takes the advantage of the finite-sum…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…