Related papers: Lower Bounds for Parallel and Randomized Convex Op…
State-of-the-art methods in convex and non-convex optimization employ higher-order derivative information, either implicitly or explicitly. We explore the limitations of higher-order optimization and prove that even for convex optimization,…
In this paper we consider parallelization for applications whose objective can be expressed as maximizing a non-monotone submodular function under a cardinality constraint. Our main result is an algorithm whose approximation is arbitrarily…
The simplex algorithm for linear programming is based on the fact that any local optimum with respect to the polyhedral neighborhood is also a global optimum. We show that a similar result carries over to submodular maximization. In…
Communication delays and synchronization are major bottlenecks for parallel computing, and tolerating asynchrony is therefore crucial for accelerating parallel computation. Motivated by optimization problems that do not satisfy convexity…
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…
The Euclidean space notion of convex sets (and functions) generalizes to Riemannian manifolds in a natural sense and is called geodesic convexity. Extensively studied computational problems such as convex optimization and sampling in convex…
In this two-part paper, we propose a general algorithmic framework for the minimization of a nonconvex smooth function subject to nonconvex smooth constraints. The algorithm solves a sequence of (separable) strongly convex problems and…
Recent research indicates that many convex optimization problems with random constraints exhibit a phase transition as the number of constraints increases. For example, this phenomenon emerges in the $\ell_1$ minimization method for…
Many recent studies on first-order methods (FOMs) focus on \emph{composite non-convex non-smooth} optimization with linear and/or nonlinear function constraints. Upper (or worst-case) complexity bounds have been established for these…
This paper explores a surprising equivalence between two seemingly-distinct convex optimization methods. We show that simulated annealing, a well-studied random walk algorithms, is directly equivalent, in a certain sense, to the central…
This paper presents the design and analysis of parallel approximation algorithms for facility-location problems, including $\NC$ and $\RNC$ algorithms for (metric) facility location, $k$-center, $k$-median, and $k$-means. These problems…
We study nonconvex optimization landscapes for learning overcomplete representations, including learning (i) sparsely used overcomplete dictionaries and (ii) convolutional dictionaries, where these unsupervised learning problems find many…
In the optimization of convex domains under a PDE constraint numerical difficulties arise in the approximation of convex domains in $\mathbb{R}^3$. Previous research used a restriction to rotationally symmetric domains to reduce shape…
We develop and analyze a set of new sequential simulation-optimization algorithms for large-scale multi-dimensional discrete optimization via simulation problems with a convexity structure. The "large-scale" notion refers to that the…
Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…
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…
It is well known that quantum, randomized and deterministic (sequential) query complexities are polynomially related for total boolean functions. We find that significantly larger separations between the parallel generalizations of these…
We seek tight bounds on the viable parallelism in asynchronous implementations of coordinate descent that achieves linear speedup. We focus on asynchronous coordinate descent (ACD) algorithms on convex functions which consist of the sum of…
Low-rank modeling has many important applications in computer vision and machine learning. While the matrix rank is often approximated by the convex nuclear norm, the use of nonconvex low-rank regularizers has demonstrated better empirical…
Recently, motivated by the rapid increase of the data size in various applications, Monemizadeh [APPROX'23] and Driemel, Monemizadeh, Oh, Staals, and Woodruff [SoCG'25] studied geometric problems in the setting where the only access to the…