Related papers: Memory-efficient structured convex optimization vi…

We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: the problem of minimizing the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex loss functions. A recent work of Bassily et al. (2019)…

Quantum computers can solve semidefinite programs (SDPs) using resources that scale better than state-of-the-art classical methods as a function of the problem dimension. At the same time, the known quantum algorithms scale very unfavorably…

We consider the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem for succinct Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the MDP consists of a set of variables, and a set of nondeterministic rules that update the variables. First, we show that several…

Stochastic saddle point (SSP) problems are, in general, less studied compared to stochastic minimization problems. However, SSP problems emerge from machine learning (adversarial training, e.g., GAN, AUC maximization), statistics (robust…

We provide a primal-dual framework for randomized approximation algorithms utilizing semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations. Our framework pairs a continuum of APX-complete problems including MaxCut, Max2Sat, MaxDicut, and more…

In this work, we propose a new local optimization method to solve a class of nonconvex semidefinite programming (SDP) problems. The basic idea is to approximate the feasible set of the nonconvex SDP problem by inner positive semidefinite…

Learning a deep neural network requires solving a challenging optimization problem: it is a high-dimensional, non-convex and non-smooth minimization problem with a large number of terms. The current practice in neural network optimization…

Given a sample covariance matrix, we solve a maximum likelihood problem penalized by the number of nonzero coefficients in the inverse covariance matrix. Our objective is to find a sparse representation of the sample data and to highlight…

This paper addresses an online convex optimization problem where the cost function at each step depends on a history of past decisions (i.e., memory), and the decision maker has access to limited predictions of future cost values within a…

We propose an enhanced zeroth-order stochastic Frank-Wolfe framework to address constrained finite-sum optimization problems, a structure prevalent in large-scale machine-learning applications. Our method introduces a novel double variance…

Several attempts to dampen the curse of dimensionnality problem of the Dynamic Programming approach for solving multistage optimization problems have been investigated. One popular way to address this issue is the Stochastic Dual Dynamic…

The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is a key reference for inference in latent variable models; unfortunately, its computational cost is prohibitive in the large scale learning setting. In this paper, we propose an extension of the…

Support vector machines (SVMs) are well-studied supervised learning models for binary classification. In many applications, large amounts of samples can be cheaply and easily obtained. What is often a costly and error-prone process is to…

This paper addresses the problem of planning under uncertainty in large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Factored MDPs represent a complex state space using state variables and the transition model using a dynamic Bayesian network. This…

The combinatorial problem Max-Cut has become a benchmark in the evaluation of local search heuristics for both quantum and classical optimisers. In contrast to local search, which only provides average-case performance guarantees, the…

Semidefinite programs (SDPs) are standard convex problems that are frequently found in control and optimization applications. Interior-point methods can solve SDPs in polynomial time up to arbitrary accuracy, but scale poorly as the size of…

In convex optimization, the problem of finding near-stationary points has not been adequately studied yet, unlike other optimality measures such as the function value. Even in the deterministic case, the optimal method (OGM-G, due to Kim…

Random projection, a dimensionality reduction technique, has been found useful in recent years for reducing the size of optimization problems. In this paper, we explore the use of sparse sub-gaussian random projections to approximate…

In this paper, we show how to transform any optimization problem that arises from fitting a machine learning model into one that (1) detects and removes contaminated data from the training set while (2) simultaneously fitting the trimmed…

We propose a rank-$k$ variant of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve convex optimization over a trace-norm ball. Our algorithm replaces the top singular-vector computation ($1$-SVD) in Frank-Wolfe with a top-$k$ singular-vector…