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In this paper, we propose a Riemannian smoothing steepest descent method to minimize a nonconvex and non-Lipschitz function on submanifolds. The generalized subdifferentials on Riemannian manifold and the Riemannian gradient sub-consistency…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-12 Chao Zhang , Xiaojun Chen , Shiqian Ma

We propose an adaptive step size with an energy approach for a suitable class of preconditioned gradient descent methods. We focus on settings where the preconditioning is applied to address the constraints in optimization problems, such as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-17 Hailiang Liu , Levon Nurbekyan , Xuping Tian , Yunan Yang

We propose perturbed proximal algorithms that can provably escape strict saddles for nonsmooth weakly convex functions. The main results are based on a novel characterization of $\epsilon$-approximate local minimum for nonsmooth functions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Minhui Huang , Weiming Zhu

We study the Wasserstein natural gradient in parametric statistical models with continuous sample spaces. Our approach is to pull back the $L^2$-Wasserstein metric tensor in the probability density space to a parameter space, equipping the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-20 Yifan Chen , Wuchen Li

Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Xiaoyu Li

In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-16 Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Saeed Ghadimi

A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Lei Qin , Michael Cantoni , Ye Pu

Momentum Stochastic Gradient Descent (MSGD) algorithm has been widely applied to many nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, e.g., training deep neural networks, variational Bayesian inference, and etc. Despite its empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Tianyi Liu , Zhehui Chen , Enlu Zhou , Tuo Zhao

It is known that gradient descent (GD) on a $C^2$ cost function generically avoids strict saddle points when using a small, constant step size. However, no such guarantee existed for GD with a line-search method. We provide one for a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-17 Andreea-Alexandra Muşat , Nicolas Boumal

We propose a rank-one Riemannian subspace descent algorithm for computing symmetric positive definite (SPD) solutions to nonlinear matrix equations arising in control theory, dynamic programming, and stochastic filtering. For solution…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-01-22 Yogesh Darmwal , Ketan Rajawat

Orthogonality constraints naturally appear in many machine learning problems, from principal component analysis to robust neural network training. They are usually solved using Riemannian optimization algorithms, which minimize the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-08 Pierre Ablin , Simon Vary , Bin Gao , P. -A. Absil

We consider the minimization of a function defined on a Riemannian manifold $\mathcal{M}$ accessible only through unbiased estimates of its gradients. We develop a geometric framework to transform a sequence of slowly converging iterates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-11 Nilesh Tripuraneni , Nicolas Flammarion , Francis Bach , Michael I. Jordan

Gradient Descent (GD) is a ubiquitous algorithm for finding the optimal solution to an optimization problem. For reduced computational complexity, the optimal solution $\mathrm{x^*}$ of the optimization problem must be attained in a minimum…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-01 Revati Gunjal , Sushama Wagh , Syed Shadab Nayyer , Alex Stankovic , Navdeep M. Singh

We study optimization of finite sums of geodesically smooth functions on Riemannian manifolds. Although variance reduction techniques for optimizing finite-sums have witnessed tremendous attention in the recent years, existing work is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-04-11 Hongyi Zhang , Sashank J. Reddi , Suvrit Sra

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Gregory Dexter , Borja Ocejo , Sathiya Keerthi , Aman Gupta , Ayan Acharya , Rajiv Khanna

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Ruinan Jin , Difei Cheng , Hong Qiao , Xin Shi , Shaodong Liu , Bo Zhang

Riemannian optimization is concerned with problems, where the independent variable lies on a smooth manifold. There is a number of problems from numerical linear algebra that fall into this category, where the manifold is usually specified…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-06-27 Rasmus Jensen , Ralf Zimmermann

Optimization on Hadamard manifolds -- the natural Riemannian setting for globally geodesically convex problems -- relies on exponential maps to retract tangent vectors and parallel transport to connect tangent spaces across the manifold.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-01 Mateo Díaz , Benjamin Grimmer , Ian McPherson

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-01 Songtao Lu , Mingyi Hong , Zhengdao Wang

Many machine learning applications are naturally formulated as optimization problems on Riemannian manifolds. The main idea behind Riemannian optimization is to maintain the feasibility of the variables while moving along a descent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-05 Andi Han , Pratik Jawanpuria , Bamdev Mishra