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We prove convergence of a single time-scale stochastic subgradient method with subgradient averaging for constrained problems with a nonsmooth and nonconvex objective function having the property of generalized differentiability. As a tool…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
In this paper we propose a variant of the random coordinate descent method for solving linearly constrained convex optimization problems with composite objective functions. If the smooth part of the objective function has Lipschitz…
In this paper, we present a generic framework to extend existing uniformly optimal convex programming algorithms to solve more general nonlinear, possibly nonconvex, optimization problems. The basic idea is to incorporate a local search…
In this paper we propose several adaptive gradient methods for stochastic optimization. Unlike AdaGrad-type of methods, our algorithms are based on Armijo-type line search and they simultaneously adapt to the unknown Lipschitz constant of…
This paper considers the problem of solving systems of quadratic equations, namely, recovering an object of interest $\mathbf{x}^{\natural}\in\mathbb{R}^{n}$ from $m$ quadratic equations/samples…
In this paper, we propose a new way to obtain optimal convergence rates for smooth stochastic (strong) convex optimization tasks. Our approach is based on results for optimization tasks where gradients have nonrandom noise. In contrast to…
For strongly convex objectives that are smooth, the classical theory of gradient descent ensures linear convergence relative to the number of gradient evaluations. An analogous nonsmooth theory is challenging. Even when the objective is…
We suggest a simple adaptive step-size procedure, which does not require any line-search, for a general class of nonlinear optimization methods and prove convergence of a general method under mild assumptions. In particular, the goal…
In this paper, we propose a proximal gradient method and an accelerated proximal gradient method for solving composite optimization problems, where the objective function is the sum of a smooth and a convex, possibly nonsmooth, function. We…
This article introduces a novel family of optimization algorithms - Anisotropic Gaussian Smoothing Gradient Descent (AGS-GD), AGS-Stochastic Gradient Descent (AGS-SGD), and AGS-Adam - that employ anisotropic Gaussian smoothing to enhance…
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,…
We study unconstrained optimization problems with nonsmooth and convex objective function in the form of a mathematical expectation. The proposed method approximates the expected objective function with a sample average function using…
Motivated by applications arising from sensor networks and machine learning, we consider the problem of minimizing a finite sum of nondifferentiable convex functions where each component function is associated with an agent and a…
This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
The study of optimal control problems under uncertainty plays an important role in scientific numerical simulations. This class of optimization problems is strongly utilized in engineering, biology and finance. In this paper, a stochastic…
Approximation of subdifferentials is one of the main tasks when computing descent directions for nonsmooth optimization problems. In this article, we propose a bisection method for weakly lower semismooth functions which is able to compute…
We propose an adaptive accelerated gradient method for solving smooth convex optimization problems. The method incorporates a scheme to determine the step size adaptively, by means of a local estimation of the smoothness constant, which is…
In this paper, we suggest a new framework for analyzing primal subgradient methods for nonsmooth convex optimization problems. We show that the classical step-size rules, based on normalization of subgradient, or on the knowledge of optimal…