Related papers: Efficient Algorithms for Approximate Smooth Select…
We consider the problem of minimizing a sum of several convex non-smooth functions. We introduce a new algorithm called the selective linearization method, which iteratively linearizes all but one of the functions and employs simple…
We study the sublinear multivariate mean estimation problem in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space. Specifically, we aim to find the mean $\mu$ of a ground point set $A$, which minimizes the sum of squared Euclidean distances of the points in…
We propose a unifying algorithm for non-smooth non-convex optimization. The algorithm approximates the objective function by a convex model function and finds an approximate (Bregman) proximal point of the convex model. This approximate…
We establish efficient approximate counting algorithms for several natural problems in local lemma regimes. In particular, we consider the probability of intersection of events and the dimension of intersection of subspaces. Our approach is…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex objective which is the sum of a smooth part, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a nonsmooth part. Inspired by various applications, we focus on the case when the nonsmooth part is a…
We introduce a notion of self-concordant smoothing for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth and the other nonsmooth. The key highlight is a natural property of the resulting problem's structure that yields a…
Randomized smoothing is currently the state-of-the-art method that provides certified robustness for deep neural networks. However, due to its excessively conservative nature, this method of incomplete verification often cannot achieve an…
We present a hybrid algorithm for optimizing a convex, smooth function over the cone of positive semidefinite matrices. Our algorithm converges to the global optimal solution and can be used to solve general large-scale semidefinite…
In this paper, we propose an accelerated quasi-Newton proximal extragradient (A-QPNE) method for solving unconstrained smooth convex optimization problems. With access only to the gradients of the objective, we prove that our method can…
Composite convex optimization problems which include both a nonsmooth term and a low-rank promoting term have important applications in machine learning and signal processing, such as when one wishes to recover an unknown matrix that is…
$K$-means, a simple and effective clustering algorithm, is one of the most widely used algorithms in multimedia and computer vision community. Traditional $k$-means is an iterative algorithm---in each iteration new cluster centers are…
We investigate how to solve smooth matrix optimization problems with general linear inequality constraints on the eigenvalues of a symmetric matrix. We present solution methods to obtain exact global minima for linear objective functions,…
In the $k$-cut problem, we are given an edge-weighted graph $G$ and an integer $k$, and have to remove a set of edges with minimum total weight so that $G$ has at least $k$ connected components. The current best algorithms are an…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
In this work, we consider convex optimization problems with smooth objective function and nonsmooth functional constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called Stochastic Halfspace Approximation Method (SHAM), to solve…
We study two generalizations of classic clustering problems called dynamic ordered $k$-median and dynamic $k$-supplier, where the points that need clustering evolve over time, and we are allowed to move the cluster centers between…
We study the problem of approximating the number of $k$-cliques in a graph when given query access to the graph. We consider the standard query model for general graphs via (1) degree queries, (2) neighbor queries and (3) pair queries. Let…
Optimization problems under affine constraints appear in various areas of machine learning. We consider the task of minimizing a smooth strongly convex function F(x) under the affine constraint Kx=b, with an oracle providing evaluations of…
For safety-critical black-box optimization tasks, observations of the constraints and the objective are often noisy and available only for the feasible points. We propose an approach based on log barriers to find a local solution of a…
In this work, we examine sampling problems with non-smooth potentials. We propose a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for sampling from non-smooth potentials. We provide a non-asymptotical analysis of our algorithm and establish a…