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In this paper, we aim at providing an introduction to the gradient descent based optimization algorithms for learning deep neural network models. Deep learning models involving multiple nonlinear projection layers are very challenging to…
Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in…
Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by…
We consider distributed smooth nonconvex unconstrained optimization over networks, modeled as a connected graph. We examine the behavior of distributed gradient-based algorithms near strict saddle points. Specifically, we establish that (i)…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…
Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…
This paper presents an algorithmic framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems using only stochastic function evaluations. We employ central finite-difference based gradient estimation methods to approximate the…
Distributed stochastic optimization has drawn great attention recently due to its effectiveness in solving large-scale machine learning problems. Though numerous algorithms have been proposed and successfully applied to general practical…
In this paper, we provide a mathematical framework for improving generalization in a class of learning problems which is related to point estimations for modeling of high-dimensional nonlinear functions. In particular, we consider a…
Minimizing a convex function of a measure with a sparsity-inducing penalty is a typical problem arising, e.g., in sparse spikes deconvolution or two-layer neural networks training. We show that this problem can be solved by discretizing the…
Gradient matching with Gaussian processes is a promising tool for learning parameters of ordinary differential equations (ODE's). The essence of gradient matching is to model the prior over state variables as a Gaussian process which…
Gradient-based methods successfully train highly overparameterized models in practice, even though the associated optimization problems are markedly nonconvex. Understanding the mechanisms that make such methods effective has become a…
This paper extends algorithms that remove the fixed point bias of decentralized gradient descent to solve the more general problem of distributed optimization over subspace constraints. Leveraging the integral quadratic constraint…
Optimal control problems are inherently hard to solve as the optimization must be performed simultaneously with updating the underlying system. Starting from an initial guess, Howard's policy improvement algorithm separates the step of…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic search algorithm for solving general optimization problems with little structure. The algorithm iteratively finds high quality solutions by randomly sampling candidate solutions from a parameterized…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an emerging field of RL in which policies are learned solely from demonstrations. Within offline RL, some environments involve balancing multiple objectives, but existing multi-objective offline RL…
Adaptive gradient algorithms perform gradient-based updates using the history of gradients and are ubiquitous in training deep neural networks. While adaptive gradient methods theory is well understood for minimization problems, the…
This paper studies the distributed optimization problem when the objective functions might be nondifferentiable and subject to heterogeneous set constraints. Unlike existing subgradient methods, we focus on the case when the exact…
In this article we develop a gradient-based algorithm for the solution of multiobjective optimization problems with uncertainties. To this end, an additional condition is derived for the descent direction in order to account for…
We consider distributed optimization under communication constraints for training deep learning models. We propose a new algorithm, whose parameter updates rely on two forces: a regular gradient step, and a corrective direction dictated by…