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In this paper, we study optimization methods consisting of iteratively minimizing surrogates of an objective function. By proposing several algorithmic variants and simple convergence analyses, we make two main contributions. First, we…
This paper studies adaptive first-order least-squares finite element methods for second-order elliptic partial differential equations in non-divergence form. Unlike the classical finite element method which uses weak formulations of PDEs…
Using an optimization algorithm to solve a machine learning problem is one of mainstreams in the field of science. In this work, we demonstrate a comprehensive comparison of some state-of-the-art first-order optimization algorithms for…
This paper establishes the theoretical foundations of the online scaled gradient methods (OSGM), a framework that utilizes online learning to adapt stepsizes and provably accelerate first-order methods. OSGM quantifies the effectiveness of…
In this paper we study proximal conditional-gradient (CG) and proximal gradient-projection type algorithms for a block-structured constrained nonconvex optimization model, which arises naturally from tensor data analysis. First, we…
The proximal gradient method is a generic technique introduced to tackle the non-smoothness in optimization problems, wherein the objective function is expressed as the sum of a differentiable convex part and a non-differentiable…
Constrained optimization problems where both the objective and constraints may be nonsmooth and nonconvex arise across many learning and data science settings. In this paper, we show for any Lipschitz, weakly convex objectives and…
In this paper, we study a class of deterministically constrained stochastic optimization problems. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-stochastic stationary point, where the expected violations of both constraints and…
Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…
We show that the exact worst-case performance of fixed-step first-order methods for unconstrained optimization of smooth (possibly strongly) convex functions can be obtained by solving convex programs. Finding the worst-case performance of…
In this paper, we propose first-order feasible methods for difference-of-convex (DC) programs with smooth inequality and simple geometric constraints. Our strategy for maintaining feasibility of the iterates is based on a "retraction" idea…
We study distributed optimization to minimize a global objective that is a sum of smooth and strongly-convex local cost functions. Recently, several algorithms over undirected and directed graphs have been proposed that use a gradient…
We propose an adaptive smoothing algorithm based on Nesterov's smoothing technique in \cite{Nesterov2005c} for solving "fully" nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems. Our method combines both Nesterov's accelerated proximal…
The aim of this paper is to design an efficient multigrid method for constrained convex optimization problems arising from discretization of some underlying infinite dimensional problems. Due to problem dependency of this approach, we only…
We investigate a class of nonconvex optimization problems characterized by a feasible set consisting of level-bounded nonconvex regularizers, with a continuously differentiable objective. We propose a novel hybrid approach to tackle such…
We address composite optimization problems, which consist in minimizing the sum of a smooth and a merely lower semicontinuous function, without any convexity assumptions. Numerical solutions of these problems can be obtained by proximal…
In this paper, we consider estimating sparse inverse covariance of a Gaussian graphical model whose conditional independence is assumed to be partially known. Similarly as in [5], we formulate it as an $l_1$-norm penalized maximum…
The geometric optimization of crystal structures is a procedure widely used in Chemistry that changes the geometrical placement of the particles inside a structure. It is called structural relaxation and constitutes a local minimization…
Gradient-related first-order methods have become the workhorse of large-scale numerical optimization problems. Many of these problems involve nonconvex objective functions with multiple saddle points, which necessitates an understanding of…
Large-scale optimization problems that seek sparse solutions have become ubiquitous. They are routinely solved with various specialized first-order methods. Although such methods are often fast, they usually struggle with not-so-well…