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In this paper we study the auxiliary problems that appear in $p$-order tensor methods for unconstrained minimization of convex functions with $\nu$-H\"{o}lder continuous $p$th derivatives. This type of auxiliary problems corresponds to the…
Functional constrained optimization is becoming more and more important in machine learning and operations research. Such problems have potential applications in risk-averse machine learning, semisupervised learning, and robust optimization…
Given a nonconvex function that is an average of $n$ smooth functions, we design stochastic first-order methods to find its approximate stationary points. The convergence of our new methods depends on the smallest (negative) eigenvalue…
It is well-known that the lower bound of iteration complexity for solving nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems is $\Omega(1/\epsilon^2)$, which can be achieved by standard gradient descent algorithm when the objective function is…
In this paper, we propose a proximal gradient method and an accelerated proximal gradient method for solving composite optimization problems, where the objective function is the sum of a smooth and a convex, possibly nonsmooth, function. We…
We introduce a detailed analysis of the convergence of first-order methods with composite noise (sum of relative and absolute) in gradient for convex and smooth function minimization. This paper illustrates instances of practical problems…
This paper describes a method for solving smooth nonconvex minimization problems subject to bound constraints with good worst-case complexity guarantees and practical performance. The method contains elements of two existing methods: the…
We propose a stochastic nonconvex optimization algorithm that achieves almost sure $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-1.5})$ iteration complexity for problems with smooth objective functions and gradients only observable with noise. The…
Traditional algorithms for stochastic optimization require projecting the solution at each iteration into a given domain to ensure its feasibility. When facing complex domains, such as positive semi-definite cones, the projection operation…
In this paper we analyze several inexact fast augmented Lagrangian methods for solving linearly constrained convex optimization problems. Mainly, our methods rely on the combination of excessive-gap-like smoothing technique developed in…
In this work, we develop new insights into the fundamental problem of convexity testing of real-valued functions over the domain $[n]$. Specifically, we present a nonadaptive algorithm that, given inputs $\eps \in (0,1), s \in \mathbb{N}$,…
This paper considers unconstrained convex optimization problems with time-varying objective functions. We propose algorithms with a discrete time-sampling scheme to find and track the solution trajectory based on prediction and correction…
This paper considers the robust phase retrieval problem, which can be cast as a nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization problem. We propose a new inexact proximal linear algorithm with the subproblem being solved inexactly. Our contributions…
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…
Despite its important applications in Machine Learning, min-max optimization of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives remains elusive. Not only are there no known first-order methods converging even to approximate local min-max points, but the…
We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…
We introduce a notion of inexact model of a convex objective function, which allows for errors both in the function and in its gradient. For this situation, a gradient method with an adaptive adjustment of some parameters of the model is…
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…
This paper studies the lower bound complexity for the optimization problem whose objective function is the average of $n$ individual smooth convex functions. We consider the algorithm which gets access to gradient and proximal oracle for…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-level compositional optimization, where the objective function is a composition of multiple smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Existing methods for solving this problem…