Related papers: Oracle Complexity in Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimizat…
It is well-known that given a bounded, smooth nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (where the gradient norm is less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ iterations. However,…
We present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…
We give nearly matching upper and lower bounds on the oracle complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points ($\| \nabla F(x) \| \leq\epsilon$) in stochastic convex optimization. We jointly analyze the oracle complexity in both the local…
We consider a non-convex constrained optimization problem, where the objective function is weakly convex and the constraint function is either convex or weakly convex. To solve this problem, we consider the classical switching subgradient…
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…
Finding approximate stationary points, i.e., points where the gradient is approximately zero, of non-convex but smooth objective functions $f$ over unrestricted $d$-dimensional domains is one of the most fundamental problems in classical…
Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…
Zeroth-order optimization, which does not use derivative information, is one of the significant research areas in the field of mathematical optimization and machine learning. Although various studies have explored zeroth-order algorithms,…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
Various optimal gradient-based algorithms have been developed for smooth nonconvex optimization. However, many nonconvex machine learning problems do not belong to the class of smooth functions and therefore the existing algorithms are…
We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…
We study the problem of finding an $\epsilon$-first-order stationary point (FOSP) of a smooth function, given access only to gradient information. The best-known gradient query complexity for this task, assuming both the gradient and…
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…
Many statistical estimation procedures lead to nonconvex optimization problems. Algorithms to solve these are often guaranteed to output a stationary point of the optimization problem. Oracle inequalities are an important theoretical…
An adaptive regularization algorithm using inexact function and derivatives evaluations is proposed for the solution of composite nonsmooth nonconvex optimization. It is shown that this algorithm needs at most…
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…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
In this work, we consider bilevel optimization when the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent works show that with a Hessian-vector product (HVP) oracle, one can provably find an $\epsilon$-stationary point within…
We investigate the finite-time analysis of finding ($\delta,\epsilon$)-stationary points for nonsmooth nonconvex objectives in decentralized stochastic optimization. A set of agents aim at minimizing a global function using only their local…
We consider a broad class of first-order optimization algorithms which are \emph{oblivious}, in the sense that their step sizes are scheduled regardless of the function under consideration, except for limited side-information such as…