Related papers: A Stochastic Derivative Free Optimization Method w…
SGD with momentum (SGDM) has been widely applied in many machine learning tasks, and it is often applied with dynamic stepsizes and momentum weights tuned in a stagewise manner. Despite of its empirical advantage over SGD, the role of…
Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…
Structured optimization problems are ubiquitous in fields like data science and engineering. The goal in structured optimization is using a prescribed set of points, called atoms, to build up a solution that minimizes or maximizes a given…
We introduce a novel approach for analyzing the performance of first-order black-box optimization methods. We focus on smooth unconstrained convex minimization over the Euclidean space $R^d$. Our approach relies on the observation that by…
This paper considers a class of constrained convex stochastic composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable convex component, together with a nonsmooth but convex component. The…
In this paper we consider stochastic composite convex optimization problems with the objective function satisfying a stochastic bounded gradient condition, with or without a quadratic functional growth property. These models include the…
We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function given quantum access to a stochastic gradient oracle. We provide two new methods for the special case of minimizing a Lipschitz convex function. Each method obtains a dimension…
This paper deals with stochastic optimization problems involving Markovian noise with a zero-order oracle. We present and analyze a novel derivative-free method for solving such problems in strongly convex smooth and non-smooth settings…
Stochastic momentum methods have been widely adopted in training deep neural networks. However, their theoretical analysis of convergence of the training objective and the generalization error for prediction is still under-explored. This…
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…
This paper investigates accelerating the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on non-convex problems. We propose a distributed primal-dual stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) equipped with "powerball" method to accelerate. We…
This paper investigates the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by the summation of $n$ local cost functions. We solve such a problem by involving zeroth-order (ZO) information…
We analyze convergence rates of stochastic optimization procedures for non-smooth convex optimization problems. By combining randomized smoothing techniques with accelerated gradient methods, we obtain convergence rates of stochastic…
Optimization problems involving sequential decisions in a stochastic environment were studied in Stochastic Programming (SP), Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In this paper we mainly concentrate on SP…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
It is known that adaptive optimization algorithms represent the key pillar behind the rise of the Machine Learning field. In the Optimization literature numerous studies have been devoted to accelerated gradient methods but only recently…
Majorization-minimization schemes are a broad class of iterative methods targeting general optimization problems, including nonconvex, nonsmooth and stochastic. These algorithms minimize successively a sequence of upper bounds of the…
We consider the optimization problem of the form $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x) \triangleq \mathbb{E}_{\xi} [F(x; \xi)]$, where the component $F(x;\xi)$ is $L$-mean-squared Lipschitz but possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. The recently…
This paper proposes a new algorithm -- the \underline{S}ingle-timescale Do\underline{u}ble-momentum \underline{St}ochastic \underline{A}pprox\underline{i}matio\underline{n} (SUSTAIN) -- for tackling stochastic unconstrained bilevel…
Visualizing graphs using virtual physical models is probably the most heavily used technique for drawing graphs in practice. There are many algorithms that are efficient and produce high-quality layouts. If one requires that the layout also…