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We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of first-order methods for escaping strict saddle points in smooth non-convex optimization. Our main contribution is a Perturbed Saddle-escape Descent (PSD) algorithm with fully explicit…
Motivated by the super-diffusivity of self-repelling random walk, which has roots in statistical physics, this paper develops a new perturbation mechanism for optimization algorithms. In this mechanism, perturbations are adapted to the…
In this paper, we focus on finding the global minimizer of a general unconstrained nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problem. Taking advantage of the smoothing method and the consensus-based optimization (CBO) method, we propose a novel…
This article presents a generic method to solve 2D multi-objective placement problem for free-form components. The proposed method is a relaxed placement technique combined with an hybrid algorithm based on a genetic algorithm and a…
Existing approaches to online convex optimization (OCO) make sequential one-slot-ahead decisions, which lead to (possibly adversarial) losses that drive subsequent decision iterates. Their performance is evaluated by the so-called regret…
Training of Artificial Neural Networks is a complex task of great importance in supervised learning problems. Evolutionary Algorithms are widely used as global optimization techniques and these approaches have been used for Artificial…
In this manuscript, we present a collective multigrid algorithm to solve efficiently the large saddle-point systems of equations that typically arise in PDE-constrained optimization under uncertainty, and develop a novel convergence…
We study the factor model problem, which aims to uncover low-dimensional structures in high-dimensional datasets. Adopting a robust data-driven approach, we formulate the problem as a saddle-point optimization. Our primary contribution is a…
The adaptive moment estimation (Adam) optimizer proposed by Kingma & Ba (2014) is presumably the most popular stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method for the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) in artificial intelligence…
Zeroth-order (a.k.a, derivative-free) methods are a class of effective optimization methods for solving complex machine learning problems, where gradients of the objective functions are not available or computationally prohibitive.…
This paper is concerned with numerically finding a global solution of constrained optimal control problems with many local minima. The focus is on the optimal decentralized control (ODC) problem, whose feasible set is recently shown to have…
In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to multi-modal optimization by enhancing the recently developed kinetic-based optimization (KBO) method with genetic dynamics (GKBO). The proposed method targets objective functions with multiple…
For solving pseudo-convex global optimization problems, we present a novel fully adaptive steepest descent method (or ASDM) without any hard-to-estimate parameters. For the step-size regulation in an $\varepsilon$-normalized direction, we…
It is well known that finding a global optimum is extremely challenging for nonconvex optimization. There are some recent efforts \cite{anandkumar2016efficient, cartis2018second, cartis2020sharp, chen2019high} regarding the optimization…
Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…
Optimization problem, which is aimed at finding the global minimal value of a given cost function, is one of the central problem in science and engineering. Various numerical methods have been proposed to solve this problem, among which the…
This work proposes a method for solving linear stochastic optimal control (SOC) problems using sum of squares and semidefinite programming. Previous work had used polynomial optimization to approximate the value function, requiring a high…
We present a specially designed evolutionary algorithm for the prediction of surface reconstructions. This new technique allows one to automatically explore all the low-energy configurations with variable surface atoms and variable surface…
In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…
Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are the workhorses of large-scale machine learning. While classical theory focused on analyzing the performance of these methods in convex optimization problems, the most notable…