Related papers: LSOS: Line-search Second-Order Stochastic optimiza…
Line search (or backtracking) procedures have been widely employed into first-order methods for solving convex optimization problems, especially those with unknown problem parameters (e.g., Lipschitz constant). In this paper, we show that…
Optimization of convex functions under stochastic zeroth-order feedback has been a major and challenging question in online learning. In this work, we consider the problem of optimizing second-order smooth and strongly convex functions…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
We present two first-order, sequential optimization algorithms to solve constrained optimization problems. We consider a black-box setting with a priori unknown, non-convex objective and constraint functions that have Lipschitz continuous…
Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in…
This paper deals with composite optimization problems having the objective function formed as the sum of two terms, one has Lipschitz continuous gradient along random subspaces and may be nonconvex and the second term is simple and…
Finite-sum optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, and are commonly solved using first-order methods which rely on gradient computations. Recently, there has been growing interest in \emph{second-order} methods, which rely…
In this paper we present a nonmonotone line search subgradient algorithm tailored to upper-$\mathcal{C}^2$ functions. This is a family of nonsmooth and nonconvex functions that satisfies a nonsmooth and local version of the descent lemma,…
We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function for which derivatives are unavailable, and a convex, nonsmooth function with easy-to-evaluate proximal operator. Of particular focus is the case where the smooth…
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…
This document introduces a strategy to solve linear optimization problems. The strategy is based on the bounding condition each constraint produces on each one of the problem's dimension. The solution of a linear optimization problem is…
The minimization of convex objectives coming from linear supervised learning problems, such as penalized generalized linear models, can be formulated as finite sums of convex functions. For such problems, a large set of stochastic…
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 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…
In this paper, we propose a scaled gradient modified non-monotone line search method for solving constrained minimization problems, and explore several specific properties of this method, namely, its convergence analysis. We discuss the…
We propose a novel linesearch variant of the trust region normal map-based semismooth Newton method developed in [Ouyang and Milzarek, Math. Program. 212(1-2), 389--435 (2025)] for solving a class of nonsmooth, nonconvex composite-type…
We study fundamental limits of first-order stochastic optimization in a range of nonconvex settings, including L-smooth functions satisfying Quasar-Convexity (QC), Quadratic Growth (QG), and Restricted Secant Inequalities (RSI). While the…
We establish lower bounds on the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points of smooth, non-convex high-dimensional functions using first-order methods. We prove that deterministic first-order methods, even applied to arbitrarily…
This paper treats the problem of minimizing a general continuously differentiable function subject to sparsity constraints. We present and analyze several different optimality criteria which are based on the notions of stationarity and…
We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…