Related papers: SNAP: Finding Approximate Second-Order Stationary …
It is well-known that given a bounded, smooth nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (where the gradient norm is less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ iterations. However,…
In this paper, we introduce a new class of nonsmooth convex functions called SOS-convex semialgebraic functions extending the recently proposed notion of SOS-convex polynomials. This class of nonsmooth convex functions covers many common…
Optimization with nonnegative orthogonality constraints has wide applications in machine learning and data sciences. It is NP-hard due to some combinatorial properties of the constraints. We first propose an equivalent optimization…
We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…
Coordinate descent methods have considerable impact in global optimization because global (or, at least, almost global) minimization is affordable for low-dimensional problems. Coordinate descent methods with high-order regularized models…
In this paper, we focus on solving a class of constrained non-convex non-concave saddle point problems in a decentralized manner by a group of nodes in a network. Specifically, we assume that each node has access to a summand of a global…
In this paper, we study the problem of solving a simple bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective is minimized over the solution set of the lower-level problem. We focus on the general setting in which both the upper-…
The stable principal component pursuit (SPCP) problem is a non-smooth convex optimization problem, the solution of which has been shown both in theory and in practice to enable one to recover the low rank and sparse components of a matrix…
In this paper we study a broad class of structured nonlinear programming (SNLP) problems. In particular, we first establish the first-order optimality conditions for them. Then we propose sequential convex programming (SCP) methods for…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
In this paper we analyze several new methods for solving nonconvex optimization problems with the objective function formed as a sum of two terms: one is nonconvex and smooth, and another is convex but simple and its structure is known.…
In this paper, we investigate a class of nonconvex and nonsmooth fractional programming problems, where the numerator composed of two parts: a convex, nonsmooth function and a differentiable, nonconvex function, and the denominator consists…
The sparse nonlinear programming (SNP) problem has wide applications in signal and image processing, machine learning, pattern recognition, finance and management, etc. However, the computational challenge posed by SNP has not yet been well…
In this paper we consider stochastic composite convex optimization problems with the objective function satisfying a stochastic bounded gradient condition, with or without a quadratic functional growth property. These models include the…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems with weakly convex objective and constraint functions. We propose Prox-PEP, a proximal method equipped with quadratic subproblems. To handle nonlinear equality constraints, we employ an…
We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…
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…
We provide a sparse version of the bounded degree SOS hierarchy BSOS [7] for polynomial optimization problems. It permits to treat large scale problems which satisfy a structured sparsity pattern. When the sparsity pattern satisfies the…
The (unweighted) point-separation problem asks, given a pair of points $s$ and $t$ in the plane, and a set of candidate geometric objects, for the minimum-size subset of objects whose union blocks all paths from $s$ to $t$. Recent work has…
In this paper, we investigate optimization problems with nonnegative and orthogonal constraints, where any feasible matrix of size $n \times p$ exhibits a sparsity pattern such that each row accommodates at most one nonzero entry. Our…