Related papers: SPIDER: Near-Optimal Non-Convex Optimization via S…
Online minimization of an unknown convex function over the interval $[0,1]$ is considered under first-order stochastic bandit feedback, which returns a random realization of the gradient of the function at each query point. Without knowing…
This paper deals with composite optimization problems having the objective function formed as the sum of two terms, one has Lipschitz continuous gradient along random subspaces and may be nonconvex and the second term is simple and…
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…
Regularized empirical risk minimization (rERM) has become important in data-intensive fields such as genomics and advertising, with stochastic gradient methods typically used to solve the largest problems. However, ill-conditioned…
We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of first-order methods for escaping strict saddle points in smooth non-convex optimization. Our main contribution is a Perturbed Saddle-escape Descent (PSD) algorithm with fully explicit…
In this paper, we propose a class of penalty methods with stochastic approximation for solving stochastic nonlinear programming problems. We assume that only noisy gradients or function values of the objective function are available via…
We develop a line-search second-order algorithmic framework for minimizing finite sums. We do not make any convexity assumptions, but require the terms of the sum to be continuously differentiable and have Lipschitz-continuous gradients.…
In this paper, we propose several new stochastic second-order algorithms for policy optimization that only require gradient and Hessian-vector product in each iteration, making them computationally efficient and comparable to policy…
This paper investigates a category of constrained fractional optimization problems that emerge in various practical applications. The objective function for this category is characterized by the ratio of a numerator and denominator, both…
In this paper, we propose a method of distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD), with low communication load and computational complexity, and still fast convergence. To reduce the communication load, at each iteration of the algorithm,…
We introduce a new tool for stochastic convex optimization (SCO): a Reweighted Stochastic Query (ReSQue) estimator for the gradient of a function convolved with a (Gaussian) probability density. Combining ReSQue with recent advances in ball…
We propose smoothed primal-dual algorithms for solving stochastic and smooth nonconvex optimization problems with linear inequality constraints. Our algorithms are single-loop and only require a single stochastic gradient based on one…
We consider distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems, reformulated as distributionally robust feasibility (DRF) problems, with multiple expectation constraints. We propose a generic stochastic first-order meta-algorithm, where…
First-order optimization (FOO) algorithms are pivotal in numerous computational domains such as machine learning and signal denoising. However, their application to complex tasks like neural network training often entails significant…
In this work, to efficiently help escape the stationary and saddle points, we propose, analyze, and generalize a stochastic strategy performed as an operator for a first-order gradient descent algorithm in order to increase the target…
We consider stochastic strongly convex optimization with a complex inequality constraint. This complex inequality constraint may lead to computationally expensive projections in algorithmic iterations of the stochastic gradient…
In this paper, we propose a new method based on the Sliding Algorithm from Lan(2016, 2019) for the convex composite optimization problem that includes two terms: smooth one and non-smooth one. Our method uses the stochastic noised…
This work provides the first finite-time convergence guarantees for linearly constrained stochastic bilevel optimization using only first-order methods, requiring solely gradient information without any Hessian computations or second-order…
Our proposal is on a new stochastic optimizer for non-convex and possibly non-smooth objective functions typically defined over large dimensional design spaces. Towards this, we have tried to bridge noise-assisted global search and faster…
We study differentially private (DP) stochastic optimization (SO) with loss functions whose worst-case Lipschitz parameter over all data may be extremely large or infinite. To date, the vast majority of work on DP SO assumes that the loss…