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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…
We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…
We study first-order optimization algorithms under the constraint that the descent direction is quantized using a pre-specified budget of $R$-bits per dimension, where $R \in (0 ,\infty)$. We propose computationally efficient optimization…
Two aspects of neural networks that have been extensively studied in the recent literature are their function approximation properties and their training by gradient descent methods. The approximation problem seeks accurate approximations…
We study problem-dependent rates, i.e., generalization errors that scale near-optimally with the variance, the effective loss, or the gradient norms evaluated at the "best hypothesis." We introduce a principled framework dubbed "uniform…
We consider robust optimization problems, where the goal is to optimize in the worst case over a class of objective functions. We develop a reduction from robust improper optimization to Bayesian optimization: given an oracle that returns…
A framework is introduced for sequentially solving convex stochastic minimization problems, where the objective functions change slowly, in the sense that the distance between successive minimizers is bounded. The minimization problems are…
We focus on the task of approximating the optimal value function in deep reinforcement learning. This iterative process is comprised of solving a sequence of optimization problems where the loss function changes per iteration. The common…
In high-dimensional statistics, variable selection recovers the latent sparse patterns from all possible covariate combinations. This paper proposes a novel optimization method to solve the exact L0-regularized regression problem, which is…
Bilevel optimization problems are receiving increasing attention in machine learning as they provide a natural framework for hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning. A key step to tackle these problems is the efficient computation of…
Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…
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…
Our work focuses on stochastic gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer. Research on this class of problem is quite limited, and until recently no non-asymptotic convergence…
Submodular function minimization is a fundamental optimization problem that arises in several applications in machine learning and computer vision. The problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time, but general purpose algorithms have…
We consider the problems of estimation and optimization of two popular convex risk measures: utility-based shortfall risk (UBSR) and Optimized Certainty Equivalent (OCE) risk. We extend these risk measures to cover possibly unbounded random…
We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…
This paper investigates the problem of tracking solutions of stochastic optimization problems with time-varying costs that depend on random variables with decision-dependent distributions. In this context, we propose the use of an online…
We propose a random coordinate descent algorithm for optimizing a non-convex objective function subject to one linear constraint and simple bounds on the variables. Although it is common use to update only two random coordinates…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…