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We consider a family of algorithms that successively sample and minimize simple stochastic models of the objective function. We show that under reasonable conditions on approximation quality and regularity of the models, any such algorithm…
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…
Structured convex optimization problems typically involve a mix of smooth and nonsmooth functions. The common practice is to activate the smooth functions via their gradient and the nonsmooth ones via their proximity operator. We show that,…
We prove the convergence of the proximal point algorithm for finding the unique minimizer of a strongly quasiconvex function in general nonlinear Hadamard spaces, generalizing a recent result due to F. Lara. Our argument is rather…
This paper introduces a smoothed proximal Lagrangian method for minimizing a nonconvex smooth function over a convex domain with additional explicit convex nonlinear constraints. Two key features are 1) the proposed method is single-looped,…
A broad range of inverse problems can be abstracted into the problem of minimizing the sum of several convex functions in a Hilbert space. We propose a proximal decomposition algorithm for solving this problem with an arbitrary number of…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
We consider saddle point problems which objective functions are the average of $n$ strongly convex-concave individual components. Recently, researchers exploit variance reduction methods to solve such problems and achieve linear-convergence…
We consider minimization of functions that are compositions of convex or prox-regular functions (possibly extended-valued) with smooth vector functions. A wide variety of important optimization problems fall into this framework. We describe…
We consider solving nonconvex composite optimization problems in which the sum of a smooth function and a nonsmooth function is minimized. Many of convergence analyses of proximal gradient-type methods rely on global descent property…
Proximal operators are now ubiquitous in non-smooth optimization. Since their introduction in the seminal work of Moreau, many papers have shown their effectiveness on a wide variety of problems, culminating in their use to construct…
In this paper, we discuss the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: a smooth function plus a non-smooth function. Further, the smooth part can be expressed by the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and…
The proximal point algorithm is a widely used tool for solving a variety of convex optimization problems such as finding zeros of maximally monotone operators, fixed points of nonexpansive mappings, as well as minimizing convex functions.…
The Primal-Dual (PD) algorithm is widely used in convex optimization to determine saddle points. While the stability of the PD algorithm can be easily guaranteed, strict contraction is nontrivial to establish in most cases. This work…
Recent work has shown that stochastically perturbed gradient methods can efficiently escape strict saddle points of smooth functions. We extend this body of work to nonsmooth optimization, by analyzing an inexact analogue of a…
We develop a globalized Proximal Newton method for composite and possibly non-convex minimization problems in Hilbert spaces. Additionally, we impose less restrictive assumptions on the composite objective functional considering…
In this paper, we consider a class of structured nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems, in which the objective function is formed by the sum of a possibly nonsmooth nonconvex function and a differentiable function whose gradient is…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
We consider several classes of highly important semidefinite optimization problems that involve both a convex objective function (smooth or nonsmooth) and additional linear or nonlinear smooth and convex constraints, which are ubiquitous in…
In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…