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Min-max saddle point games appear in a wide range of applications in machine leaning and signal processing. Despite their wide applicability, theoretical studies are mostly limited to the special convex-concave structure. While some recent…
Adaptive methods such as Adam and RMSProp are widely used in deep learning but are not well understood. In this paper, we seek a crisp, clean and precise characterization of their behavior in nonconvex settings. To this end, we first…
Large-scale non-convex sparsity-constrained problems have recently gained extensive attention. Most existing deterministic optimization methods (e.g., GraSP) are not suitable for large-scale and high-dimensional problems, and thus…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…
Bilevel optimization is one of the fundamental problems in machine learning and optimization. Recent theoretical developments in bilevel optimization focus on finding the first-order stationary points for nonconvex-strongly-convex cases. In…
We study a hybrid conditional gradient - smoothing algorithm (HCGS) for solving composite convex optimization problems which contain several terms over a bounded set. Examples of these include regularization problems with several norms as…
In this paper, we show that under over-parametrization several standard stochastic optimization algorithms escape saddle-points and converge to local-minimizers much faster. One of the fundamental aspects of over-parametrized models is that…
Implicit regularization refers to the tendency of local search algorithms to converge to low-dimensional solutions, even when such structures are not explicitly enforced. Despite its ubiquity, the mechanism underlying this behavior remains…
We study the gradient method under the assumption that an additively inexact gradient is available for, generally speaking, non-convex problems. The non-convexity of the objective function, as well as the use of an inexactness specified…
In this thesis we develop a novel framework to study smooth and strongly convex optimization algorithms, both deterministic and stochastic. Focusing on quadratic functions we are able to examine optimization algorithms as a recursive…
We consider minimizing a nonconvex, smooth function $f$ on a Riemannian manifold $\mathcal{M}$. We show that a perturbed version of Riemannian gradient descent algorithm converges to a second-order stationary point (and hence is able to…
Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…
In this paper, we present a unified analysis of methods for such a wide class of problems as variational inequalities, which includes minimization problems and saddle point problems. We develop our analysis on the modified Extra-Gradient…
The problem of stopping stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in an online manner, based solely on the observed trajectory, is a challenging theoretical problem with significant consequences for applications. While SGD is routinely monitored as…
In this paper we study the convex-concave saddle-point problem $\min_x \max_y f(x) + y^T \mathbf{A} x - g(y)$, where $f(x)$ and $g(y)$ are smooth and convex functions. We propose an Accelerated Primal-Dual Gradient Method (APDG) for solving…
In this work, we consider strongly convex strongly concave (SCSC) saddle point (SP) problems $\min_{x\in\mathbb{R}^{d_x}}\max_{y\in\mathbb{R}^{d_y}}f(x,y)$ where $f$ is $L$-smooth, $f(.,y)$ is $\mu$-strongly convex for every $y$, and…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a prevalent optimization technique for large-scale distributed machine learning. While SGD computation can be efficiently divided between multiple machines, communication typically becomes a bottleneck…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a workhorse in machine learning, yet its slow convergence can be a computational bottleneck. Variance reduction techniques such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA have been proposed to overcome this weakness,…
This paper investigates the asymmetric low-rank matrix completion problem, which can be formulated as an unconstrained non-convex optimization problem with a nonlinear least-squares objective function, and is solved via gradient descent…
Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…