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Difference-of-Convex (DC) minimization, referring to the problem of minimizing the difference of two convex functions, has been found rich applications in statistical learning and studied extensively for decades. However, existing methods…
Variance reduction techniques are designed to decrease the sampling variance, thereby accelerating convergence rates of first-order (FO) and zeroth-order (ZO) optimization methods. However, in composite optimization problems, ZO methods…
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 zeroth-order optimization problem in the huge-scale setting, where the dimension of the problem is so large that performing even basic vector operations on the decision variables is infeasible. In this paper, we propose a…
In this paper, we study stochastic non-convex optimization with non-convex random functions. Recent studies on non-convex optimization revolve around establishing second-order convergence, i.e., converging to a nearly second-order optimal…
We consider least squares semidefinite programming (LSSDP) where the primal matrix variable must satisfy given linear equality and inequality constraints, and must also lie in the intersection of the cone of symmetric positive semidefinite…
This paper is devoted to a new modification of a recently proposed adaptive stochastic mirror descent algorithm for constrained convex optimization problems in the case of several convex functional constraints. Algorithms, standard and its…
Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is one key technique for machine learning problems where gradient calculation is expensive or impossible. Several variance reduced ZO proximal algorithms have been proposed to speed up ZO optimization for…
A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…
Molecule optimization is an important problem in chemical discovery and has been approached using many techniques, including generative modeling, reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, and much more. Recent work has also applied…
Zeroth-order methods have become important tools for solving problems where we have access only to function evaluations. However, the zeroth-order methods only using gradient approximations are $n$ times slower than classical first-order…
In this paper, we present a conditional gradient type (CGT) method for solving a class of composite optimization problems where the objective function consists of a (weakly) smooth term and a (strongly) convex regularization term. While…
Conditional stochastic optimization covers a variety of applications ranging from invariant learning and causal inference to meta-learning. However, constructing unbiased gradient estimators for such problems is challenging due to the…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
We consider escaping saddle points of nonconvex problems where only the function evaluations can be accessed. Although a variety of works have been proposed, the majority of them require either second or first-order information, and only a…
In this paper we develop a randomized block-coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of a smooth and a simple nonsmooth block-separable convex function and prove that it obtains an $\epsilon$-accurate solution with probability at…
In this paper, we propose a new method based on the Sliding Algorithm from Lan(2016, 2019) for the convex composite optimization problem that includes two terms: smooth one and non-smooth one. Our method uses the stochastic noised…
Learning representation from relative similarity comparisons, often called ordinal embedding, gains rising attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods are batch methods designed mainly based on the convex optimization, say, the…
There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…