Related papers: Stochastic Optimization for DC Functions and Non-s…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
In this paper, we propose a successive convex approximation framework for sparse optimization where the nonsmooth regularization function in the objective function is nonconvex and it can be written as the difference of two convex…
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…
For solving a broad class of nonconvex programming problems on an unbounded constraint set, we provide a self-adaptive step-size strategy that does not include line-search techniques and establishes the convergence of a generic approach…
In this paper we consider minimization of a difference-of-convex (DC) function with and without linear constraints. We first study a smooth approximation of a generic DC function, termed difference-of-Moreau-envelopes (DME) smoothing, where…
This paper studies non-smooth problems of convex stochastic optimization. Using the smoothing technique based on the replacement of the function value at the considered point by the averaged function value over a ball (in $l_1$-norm or…
Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…
We consider a class of difference-of-convex (DC) optimization problems where the objective function is the sum of a smooth function and a possible nonsmooth DC function. The application of proximal DC algorithms to address this problem…
We study stochastic algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems with a convex yet possibly nonsmooth regularizer, which find wide applications in many practical machine learning applications. However, compared to asynchronous…
We consider the problem of finding critical points of functions that are non-convex and non-smooth. Studying a fairly broad class of such problems, we analyze the behavior of three gradient-based methods (gradient descent, proximal update,…
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…
We introduce a class of stochastic algorithms for minimizing weakly convex functions over proximally smooth sets. As their main building blocks, the algorithms use simplified models of the objective function and the constraint set, along…
This paper presents an algorithm to solve non-convex optimal control problems, where non-convexity can arise from nonlinear dynamics, and non-convex state and control constraints. This paper assumes that the state and control constraints…
In this report, we study decentralized stochastic optimization to minimize a sum of smooth and strongly convex cost functions when the functions are distributed over a directed network of nodes. In contrast to the existing work, we use…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
We propose a DC proximal Newton algorithm for solving nonconvex regularized sparse learning problems in high dimensions. Our proposed algorithm integrates the proximal Newton algorithm with multi-stage convex relaxation based on the…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence…
For finite-dimensional problems, stochastic approximation methods have long been used to solve stochastic optimization problems. Their application to infinite-dimensional problems is less understood, particularly for nonconvex objectives.…
We study non-smooth stochastic decentralized optimization problems over time-varying networks, where objective functions are distributed across nodes and network connections may intermittently appear or break. Specifically, we consider two…