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In this paper, we show that simple {Stochastic} subGradient Decent methods with multiple Restarting, named {\bf RSGD}, can achieve a \textit{linear convergence rate} for a class of non-smooth and non-strongly convex optimization problems…
Finding an approximate second-order stationary point (SOSP) is a well-studied and fundamental problem in stochastic nonconvex optimization with many applications in machine learning. However, this problem is poorly understood in the…
There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…
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…
In this paper we consider finding an approximate second-order stationary point (SOSP) of general nonconvex conic optimization that minimizes a twice differentiable function subject to nonlinear equality constraints and also a convex conic…
This paper explores the non-convex composition optimization in the form including inner and outer finite-sum functions with a large number of component functions. This problem arises in some important applications such as nonlinear…
This paper proposes a stochastic variant of a classic algorithm---the cubic-regularized Newton method [Nesterov and Polyak 2006]. The proposed algorithm efficiently escapes saddle points and finds approximate local minima for general…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
It is well-known that given a bounded, smooth nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (where the gradient norm is less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ iterations. However,…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for variance reduced stochastic gradient descent methods such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new…
We present an accelerated gradient method for non-convex optimization problems with Lipschitz continuous first and second derivatives. The method requires time $O(\epsilon^{-7/4} \log(1/ \epsilon) )$ to find an $\epsilon$-stationary point,…
The alternating gradient descent (AGD) is a simple but popular algorithm which has been applied to problems in optimization, machine learning, data ming, and signal processing, etc. The algorithm updates two blocks of variables in an…
This paper considers a class of constrained stochastic composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a certain non-differentiable (but…
Despite the strong theoretical guarantees that variance-reduced finite-sum optimization algorithms enjoy, their applicability remains limited to cases where the memory overhead they introduce (SAG/SAGA), or the periodic full gradient…
In this work, we consider the distributed stochastic optimization problem of minimizing a non-convex function $f(x) = \mathbb{E}_{\xi \sim \mathcal{D}} f(x; \xi)$ in an adversarial setting, where the individual functions $f(x; \xi)$ can…
We propose a sample efficient stochastic variance-reduced cubic regularization (Lite-SVRC) algorithm for finding the local minimum efficiently in nonconvex optimization. The proposed algorithm achieves a lower sample complexity of Hessian…
We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of finite sums of functions. We propose a simple, yet, practical way to incorporate variance reduction techniques into SignSGD, guaranteeing convergence that is similar to the full sign…
Constrained optimization problems where both the objective and constraints may be nonsmooth and nonconvex arise across many learning and data science settings. In this paper, we show for any Lipschitz, weakly convex objectives and…
In this paper, we study the problem of solving a simple bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective is minimized over the solution set of the lower-level problem. We focus on the general setting in which both the upper-…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…