Related papers: Solving smooth min-min and min-max problems by mix…
The use of min-max optimization in adversarial training of deep neural network classifiers and training of generative adversarial networks has motivated the study of nonconvex-nonconcave optimization objectives, which frequently arise in…
In this paper, we study the problem of constrained robust (min-max) optimization ina black-box setting, where the desired optimizer cannot access the gradients of the objective function but may query its values. We present a principled…
Many discrete minimization problems, including various versions of the shortest path problem, can be efficiently solved by dynamic programming (DP) algorithms that are "pure" in that they only perform basic operations, as min, max, +, but…
Recently, min-max optimization problems have received increasing attention due to their wide range of applications in machine learning (ML). However, most existing min-max solution techniques are either single-machine or distributed…
We study a class of bilevel optimization problems in which both the upper- and lower-level problems have minimax structures. This setting captures a broad range of emerging applications. Despite the extensive literature on bilevel…
We consider the problem of minimizing a composite convex function with two different access methods: an oracle, for which we can evaluate the value and gradient, and a structured function, which we access only by solving a convex…
We propose an extremely versatile approach to address a large family of matrix nearness problems, possibly with additional linear constraints. Our method is based on splitting a matrix nearness problem into two nested optimization problems,…
This paper presents smoothing schemes for obtaining approximate stationary points of unconstrained or linearly-constrained composite nonconvex-concave min-max (and hence nonsmooth) problems by applying well-known algorithms to composite…
We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…
This paper presents a novel outer approximation algorithm for nonsmooth mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems. The method proceeds by fixing the integer variables and solving the resulting nonlinear convex subproblem. When…
In this paper, we study the standard formulation of an optimization problem when the computation of gradient is not available. Such a problem can be classified as a "black box" optimization problem, since the oracle returns only the value…
This paper considers stochastic first-order algorithms for convex-concave minimax problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y}f(\bf x, \bf y)$, where $f$ can be presented by the average of $n$ individual components which are $L$-average…
Simple bilevel problems are optimization problems in which we want to find an optimal solution to an inner problem that minimizes an outer objective function. Such problems appear in many machine learning and signal processing applications…
We analyze algorithms for solving stochastic variational inequalities (VI) without the bounded variance or bounded domain assumptions, where our main focus is min-max optimization with possibly unbounded constraint sets. We focus on two…
Nonconvex-concave min-max problem arises in many machine learning applications including minimizing a pointwise maximum of a set of nonconvex functions and robust adversarial training of neural networks. A popular approach to solve this…
In this work, we consider a connected network of finitely many agents working cooperatively to solve a min-max problem with convex-concave structure. We propose a decentralised first-order algorithm which can be viewed as a non-trivial…
Recent focus on robustness to adversarial attacks for deep neural networks produced a large variety of algorithms for training robust models. Most of the effective algorithms involve solving the min-max optimization problem for training…
In this paper we study convex bi-level optimization problems for which the inner level consists of minimization of the sum of smooth and nonsmooth functions. The outer level aims at minimizing a smooth and strongly convex function over the…
In this paper, we consider smooth convex optimization problems with simple constraints and inexactness in the oracle information such as value, partial or directional derivatives of the objective function. We introduce a unifying framework,…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…