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We study the oracle complexity of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization, with the algorithm assumed to have access only to local function information. It has been shown by Davis, Drusvyatskiy, and Jiang (2023) that for nonsmooth Lipschitz…
Gradient descent and its variants are widely used in machine learning. However, oracle access of gradient may not be available in many applications, limiting the direct use of gradient descent. This paper proposes a method of estimating…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…
In recent years, important progress has been made in applying methods and techniques of convex optimization to many fields of applications such as location science, engineering, computational statistics, and computer science. In this paper,…
Risk minimization for nonsmooth nonconvex problems naturally leads to first-order sampling or, by an abuse of terminology, to stochastic subgradient descent. We establish the convergence of this method in the path-differentiable case and…
We consider distributed smooth nonconvex unconstrained optimization over networks, modeled as a connected graph. We examine the behavior of distributed gradient-based algorithms near strict saddle points. Specifically, we establish that (i)…
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…
We exploit analogies between first-order algorithms for constrained optimization and non-smooth dynamical systems to design a new class of accelerated first-order algorithms for constrained optimization. Unlike Frank-Wolfe or projected…
In recent centralized nonconvex distributed learning and federated learning, local methods are one of the promising approaches to reduce communication time. However, existing work has mainly focused on studying first-order optimality…
These notes focus on the minimization of convex functionals using first-order optimization methods, which are fundamental in many areas of applied mathematics and engineering. The primary goal of this document is to introduce and analyze…
We investigate the problem of finding second-order stationary points (SOSP) in differentially private (DP) stochastic non-convex optimization. Existing methods suffer from two key limitations: (i) inaccurate convergence error rate due to…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…
The article discusses distributed gradient-descent algorithms for computing local and global minima in nonconvex optimization. For local optimization, we focus on distributed stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD)--a simple network-based…
In this paper we investigate the convergence of a recently popular class of first-order primal-dual algorithms for saddle point problems under the presence of errors occurring in the proximal maps and gradients. We study several types of…
Trust region and cubic regularization methods have demonstrated good performance in small scale non-convex optimization, showing the ability to escape from saddle points. Each iteration of these methods involves computation of gradient,…
Worst-case complexity guarantees for nonconvex optimization algorithms have been a topic of growing interest. Multiple frameworks that achieve the best known complexity bounds among a broad class of first- and second-order strategies have…
Despite its important applications in Machine Learning, min-max optimization of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives remains elusive. Not only are there no known first-order methods converging even to approximate local min-max points, but the…
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}…