Related papers: A General Analysis Framework of Lower Complexity B…
It is well-known that given a smooth, bounded-from-below, and possibly nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$…
Many convex optimization problems have structured objective function written as a sum of functions with different types of oracles (full gradient, coordinate derivative, stochastic gradient) and different evaluation complexity of these…
We initiate the study of nonsmooth optimization problems under bounded local subgradient variation, which postulates bounded difference between (sub)gradients in small local regions around points, in either average or maximum sense. The…
This paper considers stochastic first-order algorithms for convex-concave minimax problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y}f(\bf x, \bf y)$, where $f$ can be presented by the average of $n$ individual components which are $L$-average…
We study the conditions under which one is able to efficiently apply variance-reduction and acceleration schemes on finite sum optimization problems. First, we show that, perhaps surprisingly, the finite sum structure by itself, is not…
This paper studies minimax optimization problems $\min_x \max_y f(x,y)$, where $f(x,y)$ is $m_x$-strongly convex with respect to $x$, $m_y$-strongly concave with respect to $y$ and $(L_x,L_{xy},L_y)$-smooth. Zhang et al. provided the…
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 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 consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite…
We prove a \emph{query complexity} lower bound on rank-one principal component analysis (PCA). We consider an oracle model where, given a symmetric matrix $M \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$, an algorithm is allowed to make $T$ \emph{exact}…
In this paper, we study the lower iteration complexity bounds for finding the saddle point of a strongly convex and strongly concave saddle point problem: $\min_x\max_yF(x,y)$. We restrict the classes of algorithms in our investigation to…
We propose a first order algorithm, a modified version of FISTA, to solve an optimization problem with an objective function that is a sum of a possibly nonconvex function, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a convex function which can…
We study the complexity of optimizing highly smooth convex functions. For a positive integer $p$, we want to find an $\epsilon$-approximate minimum of a convex function $f$, given oracle access to the function and its first $p$ derivatives,…
This paper shows that the optimal subgradient algorithm, OSGA, proposed in \cite{NeuO} can be used for solving structured large-scale convex constrained optimization problems. Only first-order information is required, and the optimal…
Many recent studies on first-order methods (FOMs) focus on \emph{composite non-convex non-smooth} optimization with linear and/or nonlinear function constraints. Upper (or worst-case) complexity bounds have been established for these…
The total complexity (measured as the total number of gradient computations) of a stochastic first-order optimization algorithm that finds a first-order stationary point of a finite-sum smooth nonconvex objective function $F(w)=\frac{1}{n}…
First order methods endowed with global convergence guarantees operate using global lower bounds on the objective. The tightening of the bounds has been shown to increase both the theoretical guarantees and the practical performance. In…
Relative to the large literature on upper bounds on complexity of convex optimization, lesser attention has been paid to the fundamental hardness of these problems. Given the extensive use of convex optimization in machine learning and…
Minimizing a convex, quadratic objective of the form $f_{\mathbf{A},\mathbf{b}}(x) := \frac{1}{2}x^\top \mathbf{A} x - \langle \mathbf{b}, x \rangle$ for $\mathbf{A} \succ 0 $ is a fundamental problem in machine learning and optimization.…
In this paper, we establish lower bounds for the oracle complexity of the first-order methods minimizing regularized convex functions. We consider the composite representation of the objective. The smooth part has H\"older continuous…