Related papers: Efficiently avoiding saddle points with zero order…
A very simple first-order algorithm is proposed for solving nonlinear optimization problems with deterministic nonlinear equality constraints. This algorithm adaptively selects steps in the plane tangent to the constraints or steps that…
We design an algorithm which finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point (with $\|\nabla F(x)\|\le \epsilon$) using $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector products, matching guarantees that were previously available…
This paper considers the nonconvex nonsmooth problem in which the objective function is Lipschitz continuous. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access stochastic function value evaluations with heavy-tailed noise,…
We study the complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz objectives which are possibly neither smooth nor convex, using only noisy function evaluations. Recent works proposed several stochastic zero-order…
One of the most attractive recent approaches to processing well-structured large-scale convex optimization problems is based on smooth convex-concave saddle point reformu-lation of the problem of interest and solving the resulting problem…
In order to solve the minimization of a nonsmooth convex function, we design an inertial second-order dynamic algorithm, which is obtained by approximating the nonsmooth function by a class of smooth functions. By studying the asymptotic…
We propose a primal-dual smoothing framework for finding a near-stationary point of a class of non-smooth non-convex optimization problems with max-structure. We analyze the primal and dual gradient complexities of the framework via two…
We exploit analogies between first-order algorithms for constrained optimization and non-smooth dynamical systems to design a new class of accelerated first-order algorithms for constrained optimization. Unlike Frank-Wolfe or projected…
We introduce a generic scheme to solve nonconvex optimization problems using gradient-based algorithms originally designed for minimizing convex functions. Even though these methods may originally require convexity to operate, the proposed…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
We provide an overview of primal-dual algorithms for nonsmooth and non-convex-concave saddle-point problems. This flows around a new analysis of such methods, using Bregman divergences to formulate simplified conditions for convergence.
This paper considers a class of distributed resource allocation problems where each agent privately holds a smooth, potentially non-convex local objective, subject to a globally coupled equality constraint. Built upon the existing method,…
We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…
Recently, the problem of local minima in very high dimensional non-convex optimization has been challenged and the problem of saddle points has been introduced. This paper introduces a dynamic type of normalization that forces the system to…
This paper presents an auto-conditioned proximal gradient method for nonconvex optimization. The method determines the stepsize using an estimation of local curvature and does not require any prior knowledge of problem parameters and any…
We introduce a class of first-order methods for smooth constrained optimization that are based on an analogy to non-smooth dynamical systems. Two distinctive features of our approach are that (i) projections or optimizations over the entire…
We present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…
Saddle points provide a hierarchical view of the energy landscape, revealing transition pathways and interconnected basins of attraction, and offering insight into the global structure, metastability, and possible collective mechanisms of…
We present an accelerated gradient method for non-convex optimization problems with Lipschitz continuous first and second derivatives. The method requires time $O(\epsilon^{-7/4} \log(1/ \epsilon) )$ to find an $\epsilon$-stationary point,…