Related papers: Can We Find Near-Approximately-Stationary Points o…
Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…
For strongly convex objectives that are smooth, the classical theory of gradient descent ensures linear convergence relative to the number of gradient evaluations. An analogous nonsmooth theory is challenging. Even when the objective is…
We provide a simple and flexible framework for designing differentially private algorithms to find approximate stationary points of non-convex loss functions. Our framework is based on using a private approximate risk minimizer to "warm…
This paper considers optimization of smooth nonconvex functionals in smooth infinite dimensional spaces. A H\"older gradient descent algorithm is first proposed for finding approximate first-order points of regularized polynomial…
We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…
We consider the minimization of non-convex quadratic forms regularized by a cubic term, which exhibit multiple saddle points and poor local minima. Nonetheless, we prove that, under mild assumptions, gradient descent approximates the…
We consider optimization problems over the Stiefel manifold whose objective function is the summation of a smooth function and a nonsmooth function. Existing methods for solving this kind of problems can be classified into three classes.…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
In this paper, we introduce a stochastic projected subgradient method for weakly convex (i.e., uniformly prox-regular) nonsmooth, nonconvex functions---a wide class of functions which includes the additive and convex composite classes. At a…
We revisit the classical problem of finding an approximately stationary point of the average of $n$ smooth and possibly nonconvex functions. The optimal complexity of stochastic first-order methods in terms of the number of gradient…
Despite the fact that the loss functions of deep neural networks are highly non-convex, gradient-based optimization algorithms converge to approximately the same performance from many random initial points. One thread of work has focused on…
This paper proposes a stochastic variant of a classic algorithm---the cubic-regularized Newton method [Nesterov and Polyak 2006]. The proposed algorithm efficiently escapes saddle points and finds approximate local minima for general…
We extend the standard notion of self-concordance to non-convex optimization and develop a family of second-order algorithms with global convergence guarantees. In particular, two function classes -- \textit{weakly self-concordant}…
This paper considers the fixed point problem for a nonexpansive mapping on a real Hilbert space and proposes novel line search fixed point algorithms to accelerate the search. The termination conditions for the line search are based on the…
A stochastic-gradient-based interior-point algorithm for minimizing a continuously differentiable objective function (that may be nonconvex) subject to bound constraints is presented, analyzed, and demonstrated through experimental results.…
We study the problem of finding approximate first-order stationary points in optimization problems of the form $\min_{x \in X} \max_{y \in Y} f(x,y)$, where the sets $X,Y$ are convex and $Y$ is compact. The objective function $f$ is smooth,…
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the…
This paper considers constrained stochastic nonsmooth minimax optimization problem of the form…
Optimizing non-convex functions is of primary importance in the vast majority of machine learning algorithms. Even though many gradient descent based algorithms have been studied, successive convex approximation based algorithms have been…
We consider minimization of stochastic functionals that are compositions of a (potentially) non-smooth convex function $h$ and smooth function $c$ and, more generally, stochastic weakly-convex functionals. We develop a family of stochastic…