Related papers: Can We Find Near-Approximately-Stationary Points o…

This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…

We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function given quantum access to a stochastic gradient oracle. We provide two new methods for the special case of minimizing a Lipschitz convex function. Each method obtains a dimension…

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…

The growing prevalence of nonsmooth optimization problems in machine learning has spurred significant interest in generalized smoothness assumptions. Among these, the (L0, L1)-smoothness assumption has emerged as one of the most prominent.…

Bregman proximal-type algorithms (BPs), such as mirror descent, have become popular tools in machine learning and data science for exploiting problem structures through non-Euclidean geometries. In this paper, we show that BPs can get…

We design a stochastic algorithm to train any smooth neural network to $\varepsilon$-approximate local minima, using $O(\varepsilon^{-3.25})$ backpropagations. The best result was essentially $O(\varepsilon^{-4})$ by SGD. More broadly, it…

We propose new proximal bundle algorithms for minimizing a nonsmooth convex function. These algorithms are derived from the application of Nesterov fast gradient methods for smooth convex minimization to the so-called Moreau-Yosida…

In large-scale applications, such as machine learning, it is desirable to design non-convex optimization algorithms with a high degree of parallelization. In this work, we study the adaptive complexity of finding a stationary point, which…

We focus on decentralized stochastic non-convex optimization, where $n$ agents work together to optimize a composite objective function which is a sum of a smooth term and a non-smooth convex term. To solve this problem, we propose two…

This paper proposes and analyzes a communication-efficient distributed optimization framework for general nonconvex nonsmooth signal processing and machine learning problems under an asynchronous protocol. At each iteration, worker machines…

Adaptive gradient methods, such as AdaGrad, have become fundamental tools in deep learning. Despite their widespread use, the asymptotic convergence of AdaGrad remains poorly understood in non-convex scenarios. In this work, we present the…

This note studies the distributed non-convex optimization problem with non-smooth regularization, which has wide applications in decentralized learning, estimation and control. The objective function is the sum of different local objective…

In this paper, we focus on solving a class of constrained non-convex non-concave saddle point problems in a decentralized manner by a group of nodes in a network. Specifically, we assume that each node has access to a summand of a global…

We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function over the intersection of finitely many simple sets which are easy to project onto. This is an important problem arising in various domains such as machine learning. The main difficulty…

This paper studies the complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point for stochastic bilevel optimization when the upper-level problem is nonconvex and the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent work proposed the first-order…

In the lines of our approach in \cite{Ouorou2019}, where we exploit Nesterov fast gradient concept \cite{Nesterov1983} to the Moreau-Yosida regularization of a convex function, we devise new proximal algorithms for nonsmooth convex…

We propose several new nonsmooth Newton methods for solving convex composite optimization problems with polyhedral regularizers, while avoiding the computation of complicated second-order information on these functions. Under the…

In this paper, we propose objective-function-free (OFF) variants of the proximal Newton method for nonconvex composite optimization problems and the regularized Newton method for unconstrained optimization problems, respectively, using…

Nonlinear embedding manifold learning methods provide invaluable visual insights into the structure of high-dimensional data. However, due to a complicated nonconvex objective function, these methods can easily get stuck in local minima and…