Related papers: Can We Find Near-Approximately-Stationary Points o…
Nonsmooth nonconvex-concave minimax problems have attracted significant attention due to their wide applications in many fields. In this paper, we consider a class of nonsmooth nonconvex-concave minimax problems on Riemannian manifolds.…
This paper proposes and develops new Newton-type methods to solve structured nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems with justifying their fast local and global convergence by means of advanced tools of variational analysis and…
Escaping saddle points is a central research topic in nonconvex optimization. In this paper, we propose a simple gradient-based algorithm such that for a smooth function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^n\to\mathbb{R}$, it outputs an…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are the main workhorses for solving large-scale optimization problems with nonconvex objective functions. Although the convergence of SGDs in the (strongly) convex case is well-understood,…
We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function that may be nonsmooth and nonconvex, subject to bound constraints. We propose an algorithm that uses the L-BFGS quasi-Newton approximation of the problem's curvature together with…
We introduce a class of stochastic algorithms for minimizing weakly convex functions over proximally smooth sets. As their main building blocks, the algorithms use simplified models of the objective function and the constraint set, along…
In this paper, we consider a broad class of nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems, where one objective component is a nonsmooth weakly convex function composed with a linear operator. By integrating variable smoothing techniques…
We study the basic computational problem of detecting approximate stationary points for continuous piecewise affine (PA) functions. Our contributions span multiple aspects, including complexity, regularity, and algorithms. Specifically, we…
In this work, we consider constrained stochastic optimization problems under hidden convexity, i.e., those that admit a convex reformulation via non-linear (but invertible) map $c(\cdot)$. A number of non-convex problems ranging from…
This note studies numerical methods for solving compositional optimization problems, where the inner function is smooth, and the outer function is Lipschitz continuous, non-smooth, and non-convex but exhibits one of two special structures…
We show that computing even very coarse approximations of critical points is intractable for simple classes of nonconvex functions. More concretely, we prove that if there exists a polynomial-time algorithm that takes as input a polynomial…
In convex optimization, the problem of finding near-stationary points has not been adequately studied yet, unlike other optimality measures such as the function value. Even in the deterministic case, the optimal method (OGM-G, due to Kim…
In this paper, we study the problem of escaping from saddle points in smooth nonconvex optimization problems subject to a convex set $\mathcal{C}$. We propose a generic framework that yields convergence to a second-order stationary point of…
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…
Constrained quasiconvex optimization problems appear in many fields, such as economics, engineering, and management science. In particular, fractional programming, which models ratio indicators such as the profit/cost ratio as fractional…
We consider the optimization problem of the form $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x) \triangleq \mathbb{E}_{\xi} [F(x; \xi)]$, where the component $F(x;\xi)$ is $L$-mean-squared Lipschitz but possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. The recently…
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…
In this paper, we study the convergence rate of the gradient (or steepest descent) method with fixed step lengths for finding a stationary point of an $L$-smooth function. We establish a new convergence rate, and show that the bound may be…
Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…
This paper proposes low-complexity algorithms for finding approximate second-order stationary points (SOSPs) of problems with smooth non-convex objective and linear constraints. While finding (approximate) SOSPs is computationally…