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We propose a novel stochastic smoothing accelerated gradient (SSAG) method for general constrained nonsmooth convex composite optimization, and analyze the convergence rates. The SSAG method allows various smoothing techniques, and can deal…
StochAstic Recursive grAdient algoritHm (SARAH), originally proposed for convex optimization and also proven to be effective for general nonconvex optimization, has received great attention due to its simple recursive framework for updating…
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…
Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…
We provide improved convergence rates for various \emph{non-smooth} optimization problems via higher-order accelerated methods. In the case of $\ell_\infty$ regression, we achieves an $O(\epsilon^{-4/5})$ iteration complexity, breaking the…
This paper presents a new regularization approach -- termed OpReg-Boost -- to boost the convergence and lessen the asymptotic error of online optimization and learning algorithms. In particular, the paper considers online algorithms for…
We consider a step search method for continuous optimization under a stochastic setting where the function values and gradients are available only through inexact probabilistic zeroth- and first-order oracles. Unlike the stochastic gradient…
Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…
We consider the minimization of a sum of an expectation-valued coordinate-wise $L_i$-smooth nonconvex function and a nonsmooth block-separable convex regularizer. We propose an asynchronous variance-reduced algorithm, where in each…
This paper studies a compressed momentum-based single-point zeroth-order algorithm for stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization, aiming to alleviate communication overhead and address the unavailability of explicit gradient…
Temporal-Difference (TD) learning with nonlinear smooth function approximation for policy evaluation has achieved great success in modern reinforcement learning. It is shown that such a problem can be reformulated as a stochastic…
Many important machine learning applications involve regularized nonconvex bi-level optimization. However, the existing gradient-based bi-level optimization algorithms cannot handle nonconvex or nonsmooth regularizers, and they suffer from…
We introduce a hybrid stochastic estimator to design stochastic gradient algorithms for solving stochastic optimization problems. Such a hybrid estimator is a convex combination of two existing biased and unbiased estimators and leads to…
In this paper, we consider non-smooth stochastic convex optimization with two function evaluations per round under infinite noise variance. In the classical setting when noise has finite variance, an optimal algorithm, built upon the…
This paper investigates a class of stochastic bilevel optimization problems where the upper-level function is nonconvex with potentially unbounded smoothness and the lower-level problem is strongly convex. These problems have significant…
Supported by the recent contributions in multiple branches, the first-order splitting algorithms became central for structured nonsmooth optimization. In the large-scale or noisy contexts, when only stochastic information on the smooth part…
We study the unconstrained minimization of a smooth and strongly convex population loss function under a stochastic oracle that introduces both additive and multiplicative noise; this is a canonical and widely-studied setting that arises…
The stochastic Polyak step size (SPS) has proven to be a promising choice for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), delivering competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art methods on smooth convex and non-convex optimization problems,…
We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…
A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…