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Empirical risk minimization is an important class of optimization problems with many popular machine learning applications, and stochastic variance reduction methods are popular choices for solving them. Among these methods, SVRG and…
This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…
In this paper, we propose a novel accelerated forward-backward splitting algorithm for minimizing convex composite functions, written as the sum of a smooth function and a (possibly) nonsmooth function. When the objective function is…
This work aims to solve a stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth composite optimization problem. Previous works on composite optimization problem requires the major part to satisfy Lipschitz smoothness or some relaxed smoothness conditions, which…
This paper presents a Successive Convexification ($ \texttt{SCvx} $) algorithm to solve a class of non-convex optimal control problems with certain types of state constraints. Sources of non-convexity may include nonlinear dynamics and…
We propose an enhanced zeroth-order stochastic Frank-Wolfe framework to address constrained finite-sum optimization problems, a structure prevalent in large-scale machine-learning applications. Our method introduces a novel double variance…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
We developed a corporative stochastic approximation (CSA) type algorithm for semi-infinite programming (SIP), where the cut generation problem is solved inexactly. First, we provide general error bounds for inexact CSA. Then, we propose two…
A framework based on iterative coordinate minimization (CM) is developed for stochastic convex optimization. Given that exact coordinate minimization is impossible due to the unknown stochastic nature of the objective function, the crux of…
Composite convex optimization problems which include both a nonsmooth term and a low-rank promoting term have important applications in machine learning and signal processing, such as when one wishes to recover an unknown matrix that is…
In this paper, we study the lower complexity bounds for finite-sum optimization problems, where the objective is the average of $n$ individual component functions. We consider Proximal Incremental First-order (PIFO) algorithms which have…
In this paper, we propose robust stochastic algorithms for solving convex compositional problems of the form $f(\E_\xi g(\cdot; \xi)) + r(\cdot)$ by establishing {\bf sub-Gaussian confidence bounds} under weak assumptions about the tails of…
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University. In this work we introduce several new optimisation methods for problems in machine learning. Our algorithms broadly fall into two categories:…
We consider convex-concave saddle-point problems where the objective functions may be split in many components, and extend recent stochastic variance reduction methods (such as SVRG or SAGA) to provide the first large-scale linearly…
Stochastic gradient method (SGM) has been popularly applied to solve optimization problems with objective that is stochastic or an average of many functions. Most existing works on SGMs assume that the underlying problem is unconstrained or…
SAGA is a fast incremental gradient method on the finite sum problem and its effectiveness has been tested on a vast of applications. In this paper, we analyze SAGA on a class of non-strongly convex and non-convex statistical problem such…
This paper studies a class of convex Finite-sum Coupled Compositional Optimization (cFCCO) problems with applications including group distributionally robust optimization (GDRO) and learning with imbalanced data. To better address these…
We study finite-sum distributed optimization problems involving a master node and $n-1$ local nodes under the popular $\delta$-similarity and $\mu$-strong convexity conditions. We propose two new algorithms, SVRS and AccSVRS, motivated by…
Motivated by robust matrix recovery problems such as Robust Principal Component Analysis, we consider a general optimization problem of minimizing a smooth and strongly convex loss function applied to the sum of two blocks of variables,…
Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) are predominant approaches for solving stochastic optimization. On smooth nonconvex problems, a few acceleration techniques have been applied to improve the convergence rate of SGMs. However, little…