Related papers: SPIDER: Near-Optimal Non-Convex Optimization via S…
In this work, we focus on the study of stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order gradient information and uses only function evaluations. The problem of ZO optimization has emerged in many recent machine…
Various gradient compression schemes have been proposed to mitigate the communication cost in distributed training of large scale machine learning models. Sign-based methods, such as signSGD, have recently been gaining popularity because of…
In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…
In this paper, we consider the general non-oblivious stochastic optimization where the underlying stochasticity may change during the optimization procedure and depends on the point at which the function is evaluated. We develop Stochastic…
Variance reduction techniques are popular in accelerating gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent for optimization problems defined on both Euclidean space and Riemannian manifold. In this paper, we further improve on existing…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
This paper proposes a family of online second order methods for possibly non-convex stochastic optimizations based on the theory of preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (PSGD), which can be regarded as an enhance stochastic Newton…
In this paper we study proximal conditional-gradient (CG) and proximal gradient-projection type algorithms for a block-structured constrained nonconvex optimization model, which arises naturally from tensor data analysis. First, we…
Recently, the prediction-correction method has been developed to solve nonlinear convex optimization problems. However, its convergence rate is often poor since large regularization parameters are set to ensure convergence conditions. In…
We investigate stochastic Bregman proximal gradient (SBPG) methods for minimizing a finite-sum nonconvex function $\Psi(x):=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^nf_i(x)+\phi(x)$, where $\phi$ is convex and nonsmooth, while $f_i$, instead of gradient…
A stochastic-gradient-based interior-point algorithm for minimizing a continuously differentiable objective function (that may be nonconvex) subject to bound constraints is presented, analyzed, and demonstrated through experimental results.…
Stochastic trajectory optimization methods like STOMP enable planning with non-differentiable costs, offering substantial flexibility over gradient-based approaches. We show that STOMP implicitly minimizes the KL divergence from a Boltzmann…
We study the problem of solving strongly convex and smooth unconstrained optimization problems using stochastic first-order algorithms. We devise a novel algorithm, referred to as Recursive One-Over-T SGD (ROOT-SGD), based on an easily…
We introduce in this paper an optimal first-order method that allows an easy and cheap evaluation of the local Lipschitz constant of the objective's gradient. This constant must ideally be chosen at every iteration as small as possible,…
The distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by a sum of $n$ local cost functions by using local information exchange is considered. This problem is an important component of many machine…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
Stochastic non-convex non-concave optimization, formally characterized as Stochastic Variational Inequalities (SVIs), presents unique challenges due to rotational dynamics and the absence of a global merit function. While adaptive step-size…
In this note we propose a new variant of the hybrid variance-reduced proximal gradient method in [7] to solve a common stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problem under standard assumptions. We simply replace the independent…
Recently, multi-objective optimization (MOO) has gained attention for its broad applications in ML, operations research, and engineering. However, MOO algorithm design remains in its infancy and many existing MOO methods suffer from…
Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…