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We use differential equations based approaches to provide some {\it \textbf{physics}} insights into analyzing the dynamics of popular optimization algorithms in machine learning. In particular, we study gradient descent, proximal gradient…
Our work focuses on stochastic gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer. Research on this class of problem is quite limited, and until recently no non-asymptotic convergence…
Consider convex optimization problems subject to a large number of constraints. We focus on stochastic problems in which the objective takes the form of expected values and the feasible set is the intersection of a large number of convex…
We introduce a generic scheme for accelerating first-order optimization methods in the sense of Nesterov, which builds upon a new analysis of the accelerated proximal point algorithm. Our approach consists of minimizing a convex objective…
In planning problems, it is often challenging to fully model the desired specifications. In particular, in human-robot interaction, such difficulty may arise due to human's preferences that are either private or complex to model.…
We propose an efficient algorithm for finding first-order Nash equilibria in min-max problems of the form $\min_{x \in X}\max_{y\in Y} F(x,y)$, where the objective function is smooth in both variables and concave with respect to $y$; the…
The usual approach to developing and analyzing first-order methods for non-smooth (stochastic or deterministic) convex optimization assumes that the objective function is uniformly Lipschitz continuous with parameter $M_f$. However, in many…
The continuous-time model of Nesterov's momentum provides a thought-provoking perspective for understanding the nature of the acceleration phenomenon in convex optimization. One of the main ideas in this line of research comes from the…
The problem of joint feature selection across a group of related tasks has applications in many areas including biomedical informatics and computer vision. We consider the l2,1-norm regularized regression model for joint feature selection…
In this invited contribution, we revisit the stochastic shortest path problem, and show how recent results allow one to improve over the classical solutions: we present algorithms to synthesize strategies with multiple guarantees on the…
In machine learning research, the proximal gradient methods are popular for solving various optimization problems with non-smooth regularization. Inexact proximal gradient methods are extremely important when exactly solving the proximal…
We study computational and statistical consequences of problem geometry in stochastic and online optimization. By focusing on constraint set and gradient geometry, we characterize the problem families for which stochastic- and…
Standard stochastic optimization methods are brittle, sensitive to stepsize choices and other algorithmic parameters, and they exhibit instability outside of well-behaved families of objectives. To address these challenges, we investigate…
We study a class of stochastic nonconvex optimization in the form of $\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}} F(x):=\mathbb{E}_\xi [f(\phi(x,\xi))]$, i.e., $F$ is a composition of a convex function $f$ and a random function $\phi$. Leveraging an (implicit)…
The training of modern machine learning models often consists in solving high-dimensional non-convex optimisation problems that are subject to large-scale data. In this context, momentum-based stochastic optimisation algorithms have become…
We consider unconstrained randomized optimization of convex objective functions. We analyze the Random Pursuit algorithm, which iteratively computes an approximate solution to the optimization problem by repeated optimization over a…
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 study a stochastic optimization problem in which the sampling distribution depends on the decision variable, and the available samples are generated through an iterate-dependent Markov chain. Such settings arise naturally in problems…
A decision rule is epsilon-minimax if it is minimax up to an additive factor epsilon. We present an algorithm for provably obtaining epsilon-minimax solutions for a class of statistical decision problems. In particular, we are interested in…
We discuss non-Euclidean deterministic and stochastic algorithms for optimization problems with strongly and uniformly convex objectives. We provide accuracy bounds for the performance of these algorithms and design methods which are…