Related papers: Acceleration with a Ball Optimization Oracle

Quasar convexity is a condition that allows some first-order methods to efficiently minimize a function even when the optimization landscape is non-convex. Previous works develop near-optimal accelerated algorithms for minimizing this class…

In this paper we propose a variant of the random coordinate descent method for solving linearly constrained convex optimization problems with composite objective functions. If the smooth part of the objective function has Lipschitz…

We consider the problem of optimizing an approximately convex function over a bounded convex set in $\mathbb{R}^n$ using only function evaluations. The problem is reduced to sampling from an \emph{approximately} log-concave distribution…

This paper investigates the optimality conditions for characterizing the local minimizers of the constrained optimization problems involving an $\ell_p$ norm ($0<p<1$) of the variables, which may appear in either the objective or the…

In this paper, we provide tight lower bounds for the oracle complexity of minimizing high-order H\"older smooth and uniformly convex functions. Specifically, for a function whose $p^{th}$-order derivatives are H\"older continuous with…

Optimization problems under affine constraints appear in various areas of machine learning. We consider the task of minimizing a smooth strongly convex function F(x) under the affine constraint Kx=b, with an oracle providing evaluations of…

Bilevel optimization problems, which are problems where two optimization problems are nested, have more and more applications in machine learning. In many practical cases, the upper and the lower objectives correspond to empirical risk…

We consider convex relaxations for recovering low-rank tensors based on constrained minimization over a ball induced by the tensor nuclear norm, recently introduced in \cite{tensor_tSVD}. We build on a recent line of results that considered…

Zeroth-order optimization is the process of minimizing an objective $f(x)$, given oracle access to evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we present two simple yet powerful GradientLess Descent (GLD) algorithms that do…

Exploiting higher-order derivatives in convex optimization is known at least since 1970's. In each iteration higher-order (also called tensor) methods minimize a regularized Taylor expansion of the objective function, which leads to faster…

In this paper we develop a randomized block-coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of a smooth and a simple nonsmooth block-separable convex function and prove that it obtains an $\epsilon$-accurate solution with probability at…

This paper is intended to solve the nonconvex $\ell_{p}$-ball constrained nonlinear optimization problems. An iteratively reweighted method is proposed, which solves a sequence of weighted $\ell_{1}$-ball projection subproblems. At each…

Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function. These upper bounds are tight at the current estimate, and each iteration monotonically drives the objective…

In this paper we analyze several inexact fast augmented Lagrangian methods for solving linearly constrained convex optimization problems. Mainly, our methods rely on the combination of excessive-gap-like smoothing technique developed in…

In this paper, we consider convex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning applications (e.g., risk minimization) and mathematical statistics (e.g., maximum likelihood estimation). There are two main approaches to solve…

We consider the problem of minimizing a sum of several convex non-smooth functions. We introduce a new algorithm called the selective linearization method, which iteratively linearizes all but one of the functions and employs simple…

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…

We present a new family of min-max optimization algorithms that automatically exploit the geometry of the gradient data observed at earlier iterations to perform more informative extra-gradient steps in later ones. Thanks to this adaptation…

We prove lower bounds for higher-order methods in smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization. Our contribution is threefold: We first show that a deterministic algorithm cannot profit from the finite-sum structure of the objective, and that…

In regularized risk minimization, the associated optimization problem becomes particularly difficult when both the loss and regularizer are nonsmooth. Existing approaches either have slow or unclear convergence properties, are restricted to…