Related papers: Approximation Schemes for ReLU Regression
We study the approximation of arbitrary distributions $P$ on $d$-dimensional space by distributions with log-concave density. Approximation means minimizing a Kullback--Leibler-type functional. We show that such an approximation exists if…
Robust matrix factorization (RMF), which uses the $\ell_1$-loss, often outperforms standard matrix factorization using the $\ell_2$-loss, particularly when outliers are present. The state-of-the-art RMF solver is the RMF-MM algorithm,…
Minimization of the $L_\infty$ norm, which can be viewed as approximately solving the non-convex least median estimation problem, is a powerful method for outlier removal and hence robust regression. However, current techniques for solving…
One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies…
Many machine learning techniques sacrifice convenient computational structures to gain estimation robustness and modeling flexibility. However, by exploring the modeling structures, we find these "sacrifices" do not always require more…
We study the problem of PAC learning a linear combination of $k$ ReLU activations under the standard Gaussian distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$ with respect to the square loss. Our main result is an efficient algorithm for this learning task…
This paper studies estimation of linear panel regression models with heterogeneous coefficients, when both the regressors and the residual contain a possibly common, latent, factor structure. Our theory is (nearly) efficient, because based…
The training of artificial neural networks (ANNs) with rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation via gradient descent (GD) type optimization schemes is nowadays a common industrially relevant procedure. Till this day in the scientific…
We explore why many recently proposed robust estimation problems are efficiently solvable, even though the underlying optimization problems are non-convex. We study the loss landscape of these robust estimation problems, and identify the…
This paper considers a distributed stochastic strongly convex optimization, where agents connected over a network aim to cooperatively minimize the average of all agents' local cost functions. Due to the stochasticity of gradient estimation…
We investigate the distributed multi-agent sharing optimization problem in a directed graph, with a composite objective function consisting of a smooth function plus a convex (possibly non-smooth) function shared by all agents. While…
We consider the problem of learning function classes computed by neural networks with various activations (e.g. ReLU or Sigmoid), a task believed to be computationally intractable in the worst-case. A major open problem is to understand the…
In this manuscript, we analyze the sparse signal recovery (compressive sensing) problem from the perspective of convex optimization by stochastic proximal gradient descent. This view allows us to significantly simplify the recovery analysis…
This article considers algorithmic and statistical aspects of linear regression when the correspondence between the covariates and the responses is unknown. First, a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme is given for the natural least…
Stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints have a broad range of applications in intelligent transportation, cyber-security, and smart grids. In this paper, first, we propose an inexact-proximal accelerated…
Deep learning models are often successfully trained using gradient descent, despite the worst case hardness of the underlying non-convex optimization problem. The key question is then under what conditions can one prove that optimization…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
We provide a theoretical algorithm for checking local optimality and escaping saddles at nondifferentiable points of empirical risks of two-layer ReLU networks. Our algorithm receives any parameter value and returns: local minimum,…
We propose a robust adversarial prediction framework for general multiclass classification. Our method seeks predictive distributions that robustly optimize non-convex and non-continuous multiclass loss metrics against the worst-case…
We develop and analyze stochastic optimization algorithms for problems in which the expected loss is strongly convex, and the optimum is (approximately) sparse. Previous approaches are able to exploit only one of these two structures,…