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Drori and Teboulle [4] conjectured that the minimax optimal constant stepsize for N steps of gradient descent is given by the stepsize that balances performance on Huber and quadratic objective functions. This was numerically supported by…
Variational empirical Bayes (VEB) methods provide a practically attractive approach to fitting large, sparse, multiple regression models. These methods usually use coordinate ascent to optimize the variational objective function, an…
We present adaptive gradient methods (both basic and accelerated) for solving convex composite optimization problems in which the main part is approximately smooth (a.k.a. $(\delta, L)$-smooth) and can be accessed only via a (potentially…
We consider the composite minimization problem with the objective function being the sum of a continuously differentiable and a merely lower semicontinuous and extended-valued function. The proximal gradient method is probably the most…
We study the iteration complexity of Lipschitz convex optimization problems satisfying a general error bound. We show that for this class of problems, subgradient descent with either Polyak stepsizes or decaying stepsizes achieves minimax…
Bilevel optimization is a central tool in machine learning for high-dimensional hyperparameter tuning. Its applications are vast; for instance, in imaging it can be used for learning data-adaptive regularizers and optimizing forward…
Gradient boosting is a state-of-the-art prediction technique that sequentially produces a model in the form of linear combinations of simple predictors---typically decision trees---by solving an infinite-dimensional convex optimization…
Bilevel optimization enjoys a wide range of applications in emerging machine learning and signal processing problems such as hyper-parameter optimization, image reconstruction, meta-learning, adversarial training, and reinforcement…
We investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…
Arising in semi-parametric statistics, control applications, and as sub-problems in global optimization methods, certain optimization problems can have objective functions requiring numerical integration to evaluate, yet gradient function…
We consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In the context of most machine learning applications, each loss function is non-negative and thus can be expressed as the…
The recent literature on first order methods for smooth optimization shows that significant improvements on the practical convergence behaviour can be achieved with variable stepsize and scaling for the gradient, making this class of…
Bayesian optimization is a sequential method for minimizing objective functions that are expensive to evaluate and about which few assumptions can be made. By using all gathered data to train a Gaussian process model for the function and…
This paper presents an algorithmic framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems using only stochastic function evaluations. We employ central finite-difference based gradient estimation methods to approximate the…
In this paper, we propose a new stochastic column-block gradient descent method for solving nonlinear systems of equations. It has a descent direction and holds an approximately optimal step size obtained through an optimization problem. We…
We develop multi-step gradient methods for network-constrained optimization of strongly convex functions with Lipschitz-continuous gradients. Given the topology of the underlying network and bounds on the Hessian of the objective function,…
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…
This paper proposes a novel approach to adaptive step sizes in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by utilizing quantities that we have identified as numerically traceable -- the Lipschitz constant for gradients and a concept of the local…
In modern engineering scenarios, there is often a strict upper bound on the number of algorithm iterations that can be performed within a given time limit. This raises the question of optimal algorithmic configuration for a fixed and finite…
We present a new accelerated gradient-based method for solving smooth unconstrained optimization problems. The goal is to embed a heavy-ball type of momentum into the Fast Gradient Method (FGM). For this purpose, we devise a generalization…