Related papers: The Search direction Correction makes first-order …
We propose a first order algorithm, a modified version of FISTA, to solve an optimization problem with an objective function that is a sum of a possibly nonconvex function, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a convex function which can…
These notes focus on the minimization of convex functionals using first-order optimization methods, which are fundamental in many areas of applied mathematics and engineering. The primary goal of this document is to introduce and analyze…
The standard assumption for proving linear convergence of first order methods for smooth convex optimization is the strong convexity of the objective function, an assumption which does not hold for many practical applications. In this…
Simplex-type methods, such as the well-known Nelder-Mead algorithm, are widely used in derivative-free optimization (DFO), particularly in practice. Despite their popularity, the theoretical understanding of their convergence properties has…
In a Hilbert space setting, for convex optimization, we show the convergence of the iterates to optimal solutions for a class of accelerated first-order algorithms. They can be interpreted as discrete temporal versions of an inertial…
In this work, we develop first-order (Hessian-free) and zero-order (derivative-free) implementations of the Cubically regularized Newton method for solving general non-convex optimization problems. For that, we employ finite difference…
In this paper, through a very intuitive vanilla proximal method perspective, we derive accelerated high-order optimization algorithms for minimizing a convex function that has H\"{o}lder continuous derivatives. In this general convex…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
In this paper, we propose a unifying framework incorporating several momentum-related search directions for solving strongly monotone variational inequalities. The specific combinations of the search directions in the framework are made to…
Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in…
We propose a new random method to minimize deterministic continuous functions over subsets $\mathcal{S}$ of high-dimensional space $\mathbb{R}^K$ without assuming convexity. Our procedure alternates between a Global Search (GS) regime to…
We introduce a class of first-order methods for smooth constrained optimization that are based on an analogy to non-smooth dynamical systems. Two distinctive features of our approach are that (i) projections or optimizations over the entire…
Learning-based control algorithms require data collection with abundant supervision for training. Safe exploration algorithms ensure the safety of this data collection process even when only partial knowledge is available. We present a new…
Successive quadratic approximations, or second-order proximal methods, are useful for minimizing functions that are a sum of a smooth part and a convex, possibly nonsmooth part that promotes regularization. Most analyses of iteration…
In this paper, we consider both first- and second-order techniques to address continuous optimization problems arising in machine learning. In the first-order case, we propose a framework of transition from deterministic or…
Discrete optimization belongs to the set of $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problems, spanning fields such as mixed-integer programming and combinatorial optimization. A current standard approach to solving convex discrete optimization problems is the…
It was recently established that for convex optimization problems with sparse optimal solutions (be it entry-wise sparsity or matrix rank-wise sparsity) it is possible to design first-order methods with linear convergence rates that depend…
We present a general technique for the analysis of first-order methods. The technique relies on the construction of a duality gap for an appropriate approximation of the objective function, where the function approximation improves as the…
In this paper, we propose two novel non-stationary first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems. Unlike existing primal-dual schemes where the parameters are often fixed, our methods use…
This paper presents an algorithmic framework for the minimization of strictly convex quadratic functions. The framework is flexible and generic. At every iteration the search direction is a linear combination of the negative gradient, as…