Related papers: What is Local Optimality in Nonconvex-Nonconcave M…
In this paper, an optimal consensus problem with local inequality constraints is studied for a network of single-integrator agents. The goal is that a group of single-integrator a gents rendezvous at the optimal point of the sum of local…
We study the error landscape of deep linear and nonlinear neural networks with the squared error loss. Minimizing the loss of a deep linear neural network is a nonconvex problem, and despite recent progress, our understanding of this loss…
Recently, accelerated algorithms using the anchoring mechanism for minimax optimization and fixed-point problems have been proposed, and matching complexity lower bounds establish their optimality. In this work, we present the surprising…
Nonconvex optimization problems arise in many areas of computational science and engineering and are (approximately) solved by a variety of algorithms. Existing algorithms usually only have local convergence or subsequence convergence of…
Local SGD is a popular optimization method in distributed learning, often outperforming other algorithms in practice, including mini-batch SGD. Despite this success, theoretically proving the dominance of local SGD in settings with…
This paper considers the distributed optimization of a sum of locally observable, non-convex functions. The optimization is performed over a multi-agent networked system, and each local function depends only on a subset of the variables. An…
We study the oracle complexity of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization, with the algorithm assumed to have access only to local function information. It has been shown by Davis, Drusvyatskiy, and Jiang (2023) that for nonsmooth Lipschitz…
The study of nonconvex minimax games has gained significant momentum in machine learning and decision science communities due to their fundamental connections to adversarial training scenarios. This work develops a primal-dual alternating…
Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL), which seeks robust policy training against environment perturbation by modeling dynamics uncertainty, calls for function approximations when facing large state-action spaces.…
Many emerging applications - such as adversarial training, AI alignment, and robust optimization - can be framed as zero-sum games between neural nets, with von Neumann-Nash equilibria (NE) capturing the desirable system behavior. While…
This paper considers the decentralized convex optimization problem, which has a wide range of applications in large-scale machine learning, sensor networks, and control theory. We propose novel algorithms that achieve optimal computation…
We consider the problem of finding local minimizers in non-convex and non-smooth optimization. Under the assumption of strict saddle points, positive results have been derived for first-order methods. We present the first known results for…
Distributed optimization often consists of two updating phases: local optimization and inter-node communication. Conventional approaches require working nodes to communicate with the server every one or few iterations to guarantee…
The advancement of artificial intelligence has cast a new light on the development of optimization algorithm. This paper proposes to learn a two-phase (including a minimization phase and an escaping phase) global optimization algorithm for…
Classically, a mainstream approach for solving a convex-concave min-max problem is to instead solve the variational inequality problem arising from its first-order optimality conditions. Is it possible to solve min-max problems faster by…
The article discusses distributed gradient-descent algorithms for computing local and global minima in nonconvex optimization. For local optimization, we focus on distributed stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD)--a simple network-based…
Methods from convex optimization such as accelerated gradient descent are widely used as building blocks for deep learning algorithms. However, the reasons for their empirical success are unclear, since neural networks are not convex and…
This paper presents a fully asynchronous and distributed approach for tackling optimization problems in which both the objective function and the constraints may be nonconvex. In the considered network setting each node is active upon…
This paper considers nonsmooth convex optimization with either a subgradient or proximal operator oracle. In both settings, we identify algorithms that achieve the recently introduced game-theoretic optimality notion for algorithms known as…
We consider distributed optimization as motivated by machine learning in a multi-agent system: each agent holds local data and the goal is to minimize an aggregate loss function over a common model, via an interplay of local training and…