Related papers: Near-Optimal Methods for Minimizing Star-Convex Fu…
We consider the problem of minimizing the composition of a smooth (nonconvex) function and a smooth vector mapping, where the inner mapping is in the form of an expectation over some random variable or a finite sum. We propose a stochastic…
In this paper we develop a higher-order method for solving composite (non)convex minimization problems with smooth (non)convex functional constraints. At each iteration our method approximates the smooth part of the objective function and…
We present two easy-to-implement gradient-free/zeroth-order methods to optimize a stochastic non-smooth function accessible only via a black-box. The methods are built upon efficient first-order methods in the heavy-tailed case, i.e., when…
We provide a framework for computing the exact worst-case performance of any algorithm belonging to a broad class of oracle-based first-order methods for composite convex optimization, including those performing explicit, projected,…
In this paper, we provide the universal first-order methods of Composite Optimization with new complexity analysis. It delivers some universal convergence guarantees, which are not linked directly to any parametric problem class. However,…
We propose faster methods for unconstrained optimization of \emph{structured convex quartics}, which are convex functions of the form \begin{equation*} f(x) = c^\top x + x^\top \mathbf{G} x + \mathbf{T}[x,x,x] + \frac{1}{24} \mathopen\|…
We present in this paper first-order alternating linearization algorithms based on an alternating direction augmented Lagrangian approach for minimizing the sum of two convex functions. Our basic methods require at most $O(1/\epsilon)$…
Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…
It is well-known that the lower bound of iteration complexity for solving nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems is $\Omega(1/\epsilon^2)$, which can be achieved by standard gradient descent algorithm when the objective function is…
A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…
We propose a new method for unconstrained optimization of a smooth and strongly convex function, which attains the optimal rate of convergence of Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent. The new algorithm has a simple geometric…
We present a unified theorem for the convergence analysis of stochastic gradient algorithms for minimizing a smooth and convex loss plus a convex regularizer. We do this by extending the unified analysis of Gorbunov, Hanzely \& Richt\'arik…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function. These upper bounds are tight at the current estimate, and each iteration monotonically drives the objective…
In this paper, we focus on simple bilevel optimization problems, where we minimize a convex smooth objective function over the optimal solution set of another convex smooth constrained optimization problem. We present a novel bilevel…
In this paper, we propose Riemannian conditional gradient methods for minimizing composite functions, i.e., those that can be expressed as the sum of a smooth function and a retraction-based convex function. We analyze the convergence of…
We introduce a polynomial time algorithm for optimizing the class of star-convex functions, under no restrictions except boundedness on a region about the origin, and Lebesgue measurability. The algorithm's performance is polynomial in the…
We provide a lower bound showing that the $O(1/k)$ convergence rate of the NoLips method (a.k.a. Bregman Gradient) is optimal for the class of functions satisfying the $h$-smoothness assumption. This assumption, also known as relative…
We propose an adaptive zeroth-order method for minimizing differentiable functions with $L$-Lipschitz continuous gradients. The method is designed to take advantage of the eventual compressibility of the gradient of the objective function,…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
We consider global efficiency of algorithms for minimizing a sum of a convex function and a composition of a Lipschitz convex function with a smooth map. The basic algorithm we rely on is the prox-linear method, which in each iteration…