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In this paper, we present new stochastic methods for solving two important classes of nonconvex optimization problems. We first introduce a randomized accelerated proximal gradient (RapGrad) method for solving a class of nonconvex…

In this paper, we introduce an unbiased gradient simulation algorithms for solving convex optimization problem with stochastic function compositions. We show that the unbiased gradient generated from the algorithm has finite variance and…

In this paper, we propose Nesterov Accelerated Shuffling Gradient (NASG), a new algorithm for the convex finite-sum minimization problems. Our method integrates the traditional Nesterov's acceleration momentum with different shuffling…

In this paper, we introduce a stochastic projected subgradient method for weakly convex (i.e., uniformly prox-regular) nonsmooth, nonconvex functions---a wide class of functions which includes the additive and convex composite classes. At a…

Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) are predominant approaches for solving stochastic optimization. On smooth nonconvex problems, a few acceleration techniques have been applied to improve the convergence rate of SGMs. However, little…

Stochastic-gradient-based optimization has been a core enabling methodology in applications to large-scale problems in machine learning and related areas. Despite the progress, the gap between theory and practice remains significant, with…

While many distributed optimization algorithms have been proposed for solving smooth or convex problems over the networks, few of them can handle non-convex and non-smooth problems. Based on a proximal primal-dual approach, this paper…

We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…

We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…

Classical theory for quasi-Newton schemes has focused on smooth deterministic unconstrained optimization while recent forays into stochastic convex optimization have largely resided in smooth, unconstrained, and strongly convex regimes.…

We analyze a fast incremental aggregated gradient method for optimizing nonconvex problems of the form $\min_x \sum_i f_i(x)$. Specifically, we analyze the SAGA algorithm within an Incremental First-order Oracle framework, and show that it…

In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient…

Stochastic variance reduced methods have shown strong performance in solving finite-sum problems. However, these methods usually require the users to manually tune the step-size, which is time-consuming or even infeasible for some…

In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original stochastic variance reduction gradient (SVRG), where hereafter we refer to as the variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Different from the choices of the snapshot…

Stochastic variance reduced optimization methods are known to be globally convergent while they suffer from slow local convergence, especially when moderate or high accuracy is needed. To alleviate this problem, we propose an optimization…

We propose and analyze several stochastic gradient algorithms for finding stationary points or local minimum in nonconvex, possibly with nonsmooth regularizer, finite-sum and online optimization problems. First, we propose a simple proximal…

Stochastic composition optimization draws much attention recently and has been successful in many emerging applications of machine learning, statistical analysis, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we focus on the composition…

Difference of convex (DC) functions cover a broad family of non-convex and possibly non-smooth and non-differentiable functions, and have wide applications in machine learning and statistics. Although deterministic algorithms for DC…

The state of the art in solving nonconvex nonsmooth games under uncertainty remains in its infancy. Existing studies primarily rely on stringent growth conditions or local convexity-like properties, making the development of alternative…

In this work we aim to solve a convex-concave saddle point problem, where the convex-concave coupling function is smooth in one variable and nonsmooth in the other and not assumed to be linear in either. The problem is augmented by a…