Related papers: Near-Optimal Methods for Minimizing Star-Convex Fu…
We study fundamental limits of first-order stochastic optimization in a range of nonconvex settings, including L-smooth functions satisfying Quasar-Convexity (QC), Quadratic Growth (QG), and Restricted Secant Inequalities (RSI). While the…
In this paper, we consider gradient methods for minimizing smooth convex functions, which employ the information obtained at the previous iterations in order to accelerate the convergence towards the optimal solution. This information is…
This paper presents an algorithm for approximately minimizing a convex function in simple, not necessarily bounded convex domains, assuming only that function values and subgradients are available. No global information about the objective…
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…
Novel coordinate descent (CD) methods are proposed for minimizing nonconvex functions consisting of three terms: (i) a continuously differentiable term, (ii) a simple convex term, and (iii) a concave and continuous term. First, by extending…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…
Non-convex optimization plays a key role in a growing number of machine learning applications. This motivates the identification of specialized structure that enables sharper theoretical analysis. One such identified structure is…
We consider minimizing nonsmooth convex functions with bounded subgradients. However, instead of directly observing a subgradient at every step $k\in [0, \dots, N-1]$, we assume that the optimizer receives an adversarially corrupted…
We propose a new subgradient method for the minimization of nonsmooth convex functions over a convex set. To speed up computations we use adaptive approximate projections only requiring to move within a certain distance of the exact…
We develop a new primitive for stochastic optimization: a low-bias, low-cost estimator of the minimizer $x_\star$ of any Lipschitz strongly-convex function. In particular, we use a multilevel Monte-Carlo approach due to Blanchet and Glynn…
Given a nonconvex function that is an average of $n$ smooth functions, we design stochastic first-order methods to find its approximate stationary points. The convergence of our new methods depends on the smallest (negative) eigenvalue…
Various optimal gradient-based algorithms have been developed for smooth nonconvex optimization. However, many nonconvex machine learning problems do not belong to the class of smooth functions and therefore the existing algorithms are…
This paper explores the performance of a random Gaussian smoothing zeroth-order (ZO) scheme for minimising quasar-convex (QC) and strongly quasar-convex (SQC) functions in both unconstrained and constrained settings. For the unconstrained…
In this paper, we develop new first-order method for composite non-convex minimization problems with simple constraints and inexact oracle. The objective function is given as a sum of "`hard"', possibly non-convex part, and "`simple"'…
We develop subgradient- and gradient-based methods for minimizing strongly convex functions under a notion which generalizes the standard Euclidean strong convexity. We propose a unifying framework for subgradient methods which yields two…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
We lower bound the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm at most $\epsilon$) using stochastic first-order methods. In a well-studied model where algorithms access smooth, potentially non-convex functions…
We study the optimization of (strongly) quasar-convex functions, a class that arises naturally in many machine learning and data science applications due to its favorable properties. The fundamental properties of this class are first…
We propose a stochastic conditional gradient method (CGM) for minimizing convex finite-sum objectives formed as a sum of smooth and non-smooth terms. Existing CGM variants for this template either suffer from slow convergence rates, or…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…