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We study stochastic zeroth-order optimization with decision-dependent distributions, where the sampling law depends on the current decision and only noisy function values are available. For the non-smooth non-convex setting, we establish an…
In [19], a general, inexact, efficient proximal quasi-Newton algorithm for composite optimization problems has been proposed and a sublinear global convergence rate has been established. In this paper, we analyze the convergence properties…
Stochastic second-order methods achieve fast local convergence in strongly convex optimization by using noisy Hessian estimates to precondition the gradient. However, these methods typically reach superlinear convergence only when the…
In this paper, we consider the problem of stochastic optimization, where the objective function is in terms of the expectation of a (possibly non-convex) cost function that is parametrized by a random variable. While the convergence speed…
We develop two new stochastic Gauss-Newton algorithms for solving a class of non-convex stochastic compositional optimization problems frequently arising in practice. We consider both the expectation and finite-sum settings under standard…
A class of second-order algorithms is proposed for minimizing smooth nonconvex functions that alternates between regularized Newton and negative curvature steps in an iteration-dependent subspace. In most cases, the Hessian matrix is…
In this paper, we introduce a Homogeneous Second-Order Descent Method (HSODM) using the homogenized quadratic approximation to the original function. The merit of homogenization is that only the leftmost eigenvector of a gradient-Hessian…
We present novel algorithms for simulation optimization using random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA). These include first-order (gradient) as well as second-order (Newton) schemes. We incorporate both continuous-valued as well as…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
The cubic regularized Newton method of Nesterov and Polyak has become increasingly popular for non-convex optimization because of its capability of finding an approximate local solution with second-order guarantee. Several recent works…
Optimization problems, arise in many practical applications, from the view points of both theory and numerical methods. Especially, significant improvement in deep learning training came from the Quasi-Newton methods. Quasi-Newton search…
Motivated by recent advances in serverless cloud computing, in particular the "function as a service" (FaaS) model, we consider the problem of minimizing a convex function in a massively parallel fashion, where communication between workers…
Motivated by applications in optimization and machine learning, we consider stochastic quasi-Newton (SQN) methods for solving stochastic optimization problems. In the literature, the convergence analysis of these algorithms relies on strong…
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
First-order optimizers are reliable but slow in sharp, anisotropic regions. We study a curvature-adaptive method that periodically sketches a low-rank Hessian subspace via Hessian--vector products and preconditions gradients only in that…
In this paper, we propose and analyze algorithms for zeroth-order optimization of non-convex composite objectives, focusing on reducing the complexity dependence on dimensionality. This is achieved by exploiting the low dimensional…
Approximate Newton methods are a standard optimization tool which aim to maintain the benefits of Newton's method, such as a fast rate of convergence, whilst alleviating its drawbacks, such as computationally expensive calculation or…
We study the complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz objectives which are possibly neither smooth nor convex, using only noisy function evaluations. Recent works proposed several stochastic zero-order…
We propose a framework for online meta-optimization of parameters that govern optimization, called Amortized Proximal Optimization (APO). We first interpret various existing neural network optimizers as approximate stochastic proximal point…
Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…