Related papers: Derivative-free global minimization for a class of…

In this paper, we address the optimization problem of minimizing $Q(df_x)$ over a Hadamard manifold ${\cal M}$, where $f$ is a convex function on ${\cal M}$, $df_x$ is the differential of $f$ at $x \in {\cal M}$, and $Q$ is a function on…

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

In this paper, we study a large-scale multi-agent minimax optimization problem, which models many interesting applications in statistical learning and game theory, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The overall objective is a…

We study the problem of finding the best linear model that can minimize least-squares loss given a data-set. While this problem is trivial in the low dimensional regime, it becomes more interesting in high dimensions where the population…

This paper presents a parametric solution to piecewise linear regression through the Adaptive Block Gradient Descent (ABGD) algorithm. The heart of the method is the parametrization of piecewise linear functions as the difference of…

We consider gradient flow/gradient descent and heavy ball/accelerated gradient descent optimization for convex objective functions. In the gradient flow case, we prove the following: 1. If $f$ does not have a minimizer, the convergence…

This paper examines the question of finding feasible points to discrete-time optimal control problems. The optimization problem of finding a feasible trajectory is transcribed to an unconstrained optimal control problem. An efficient…

$L_0$-smoothness, which has been pivotal to advancing decentralized optimization theory, is often fairly restrictive for modern tasks like deep learning. The recent advent of relaxed $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness condition enables improved…

Using gradient descent (GD) with fixed or decaying step-size is a standard practice in unconstrained optimization problems. However, when the loss function is only locally convex, such a step-size schedule artificially slows GD down as it…

A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…

This paper develops and analyzes an accelerated proximal descent method for finding stationary points of nonconvex composite optimization problems. The objective function is of the form $f+h$ where $h$ is a proper closed convex function,…

There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…

We propose a new iterative optimization method for the {\bf Data-Fitting} (DF) problem in Machine Learning, e.g. Neural Network (NN) training. The approach relies on {\bf Graphical Model} (GM) representation of the DF problem, where…

This paper investigates projection-free algorithms for stochastic constrained multi-level optimization. In this context, the objective function is a nested composition of several smooth functions, and the decision set is closed and convex.…

We propose efficient numerical schemes for implementing the natural gradient descent (NGD) for a broad range of metric spaces with applications to PDE-based optimization problems. Our technique represents the natural gradient direction as a…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been found to be surprisingly effective in training a variety of deep neural networks. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how and why SGD can train these complex networks towards a…

Consider the following distributed optimization scenario. A worker has access to training data that it uses to compute the gradients while a server decides when to stop iterative computation based on its target accuracy or delay…

Recently, there has been growing interest in developing optimization methods for solving large-scale machine learning problems. Most of these problems boil down to the problem of minimizing an average of a finite set of smooth and strongly…

This book is devoted to finite-dimensional problems of non-convex non-smooth optimization and numerical methods for their solution. The problem of nonconvexity is studied in the book on two main models of nonconvex dependencies: these are…

This paper introduces a novel meshfree methodology based on Radial Basis Function-Finite Difference (RBF-FD) approximations for the numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) on surfaces of codimension 1 embedded in…