Related papers: Robust and Efficient Optimization Using a Marquard…
The Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) optimization algorithm has been widely used for solving machine learning problems. Literature reviews have shown that the LM can be very powerful and effective on moderate function approximation problems when…
Due to the highly non-convex nature of large-scale robust parameter estimation, avoiding poor local minima is challenging in real-world applications where input data is contaminated by a large or unknown fraction of outliers. In this paper,…
Minimizing the sum of a convex function and a composite function appears in various fields. The generalized Levenberg--Marquardt (LM) method, also known as the prox-linear method, has been developed for such optimization problems. The…
We extend the Levenberg-Marquardt method on Euclidean spaces to Riemannian manifolds. Although a Riemannian Levenberg-Marquardt (RLM) method was produced by Peeters in 1993, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no analysis of…
We consider the problem of computing optimal policies in average-reward Markov decision processes. This classical problem can be formulated as a linear program directly amenable to saddle-point optimization methods, albeit with a number of…
Many optimization algorithms converge to stationary points. When the underlying problem is nonconvex, they may get trapped at local minimizers and occasionally stagnate near saddle points. We propose the Run-and-Inspect Method, which adds…
In this paper, we revisit the classical problem of solving over-determined systems of nonsmooth equations numerically. We suggest a nonsmooth Levenberg--Marquardt method for its solution which, in contrast to the existing literature, does…
The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is a flexible iterative procedure used to solve non-linear least squares problems. In this work we study how a class of possible adaptations of this procedure can be used to solve maximum likelihood…
Superlinear convergence has been an elusive goal for black-box nonsmooth optimization. Even in the convex case, the subgradient method is very slow, and while some cutting plane algorithms, including traditional bundle methods, are popular…
A new Levenberg--Marquardt (LM) method for solving nonlinear least squares problems with convex constraints is described. Various versions of the LM method have been proposed, their main differences being in the choice of a damping…
Composite optimization problems involve minimizing the composition of a smooth map with a convex function. Such objectives arise in numerous data science and signal processing applications, including phase retrieval, blind deconvolution,…
Necessary optimality conditions in Lagrangian form and the sequential minimization framework are extended to mixed-integer nonlinear optimization, without any convexity assumptions. Building upon a recently developed notion of local…
We solve large-scale mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs) via distributed asynchronous saddle point computation. This is motivated by the MILPs being able to model problems in multi-agent autonomy, e.g., task assignment problems and…
This paper proposes an interior-point framework for constrained optimization problems whose decision variables evolve on matrix Lie groups. The proposed method, termed the Matrix Lie Group Interior-Point Method (MLG-IPM), operates directly…
In tabular multi-agent reinforcement learning with average-cost criterion, a team of agents sequentially interacts with the environment and observes local incentives. We focus on the case that the global reward is a sum of local rewards,…
Over the past ten years, driven by large scale optimisation problems arising from machine learning, the development of stochastic optimisation methods have witnessed a tremendous growth. However, despite their popularity, the theoretical…
We study the problem of computing the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of multivariate log-concave densities. Our main result is the first computationally efficient algorithm for this problem. In more detail, we give an algorithm that, on…
Designing sample-efficient and computationally feasible reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is particularly challenging in environments with large or infinite state and action spaces. In this paper, we advance this effort by presenting…
The main challenge of nonconvex optimization is to find a global optimum, or at least to avoid ``bad'' local minima and meaningless stationary points. We study here the extent to which algorithms, as opposed to optimization models and…
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,…