English
Related papers

Related papers: One-Point Gradient-Free Methods for Smooth and Non…

200 papers

We consider the problem of finding a saddle point for the convex-concave objective $\min_x \max_y f(x) + \langle Ax, y\rangle - g^*(y)$, where $f$ is a convex function with locally Lipschitz gradient and $g$ is convex and possibly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-29 Maria-Luiza Vladarean , Yura Malitsky , Volkan Cevher

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Tommaso Giovannelli , Jingfu Tan , Luis Nunes Vicente

We propose an adaptive proximal gradient method for minimizing the sum of two functions, where one is a simple convex function, and the other belongs to one of the three classes: nonconvex smooth, convex nonsmooth, or convex smooth. The key…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-08 Zimeng Wang , Alp Yurtsever

We lower bound the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm at most $\epsilon$) using stochastic first-order methods. In a well-studied model where algorithms access smooth, potentially non-convex functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-01 Yossi Arjevani , Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi , Dylan J. Foster , Nathan Srebro , Blake Woodworth

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Da Li , Jingjing Wu , Qingrun Zhang

Gradient methods are widely used in optimization problems. In practice, while the smoothness parameter can be estimated utilizing techniques such as backtracking, estimating the strong convexity parameter remains a challenge; moreover, even…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-17 Xiaozhe Hu , Sara Pollock , Zhongqin Xue , Yunrong Zhu

The proximal gradient algorithm has been popularly used for convex optimization. Recently, it has also been extended for nonconvex problems, and the current state-of-the-art is the nonmonotone accelerated proximal gradient algorithm.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-24 Quanming Yao , James T. Kwok , Fei Gao , Wei Chen , Tie-Yan Liu

For strongly convex objectives that are smooth, the classical theory of gradient descent ensures linear convergence relative to the number of gradient evaluations. An analogous nonsmooth theory is challenging. Even when the objective is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-19 X. Y. Han , Adrian S. Lewis

In this paper, we combine the positive aspects of the Gradient Sampling (GS) and bundle methods, as the most efficient methods in nonsmooth optimization, to develop a robust method for solving unconstrained nonsmooth convex optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-26 M. Maleknia , M. Shamsi

We study the iteration complexity of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for minimizing the gradient norm of smooth, possibly nonconvex functions. We provide several results, implying that the $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ upper bound of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Yoel Drori , Ohad Shamir

Here we present a multiscale method to calculate the saddle point associated with the effective dynamics arising from a stochastic system which couples slow deterministic drift and fast stochastic dynamics. This problem is motivated by the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-08-25 Shuting Gu , Xiang Zhou

Recent years have seen increased interest in performance guarantees of gradient descent algorithms for non-convex optimization. A number of works have uncovered that gradient noise plays a critical role in the ability of gradient descent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-08-21 Stefan Vlaski , Ali H. Sayed

The saddle-point optimization problems have a lot of practical applications. This paper focuses on such non-smooth problems in decentralized case. This work contains generalization of recently proposed sliding for centralized problem.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-01 Ilya Kuruzov , Alexander Rogozin , Demyan Yarmoshik , Alexander Gasnikov

The linear quadratic regulator is the fundamental problem of optimal control. Its state feedback version was set and solved in the early 1960s. However the static output feedback problem has no explicit-form solution. It is suggested to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-03 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Boris Polyak

We analyze the convergence rates of stochastic gradient algorithms for smooth finite-sum minimax optimization and show that, for many such algorithms, sampling the data points without replacement leads to faster convergence compared to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Aniket Das , Bernhard Schölkopf , Michael Muehlebach

We study a fixed step-size noisy distributed gradient descent algorithm for solving optimization problems in which the objective is a finite sum of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Random perturbations are introduced to the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-21 Lei Qin , Michael Cantoni , Ye Pu

We consider a class of nonsmooth fractional programming problems with fixed-point constraints, where the numerator is convex and the denominator is concave. To solve this problem, we propose splitting algorithms that compute subgradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-03 Mootta Prangprakhon , Nimit Nimana

In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-05 Cong Fang , Zhouchen Lin , Tong Zhang

We consider a popular nonsmooth formulation of the real phase retrieval problem. We show that under standard statistical assumptions, a simple subgradient method converges linearly when initialized within a constant relative distance of an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-01-09 Damek Davis , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy , Courtney Paquette

In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-10-27 Saeed Ghadimi , Guanghui Lan