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Systems involving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) have recently become more popular among the machine learning community. However prior methods usually treat infinite dimensional problems in finite dimensions with Reduced Order…
We investigate the unconstrained global optimization of functions with low effective dimensionality, that are constant along certain (unknown) linear subspaces. Extending the technique of random subspace embeddings in [Wang et al., Bayesian…
Online bilevel optimization (OBO) is a powerful framework for machine learning problems where both outer and inner objectives evolve over time, requiring dynamic updates. Current OBO approaches rely on deterministic \textit{window-smoothed}…
Quasi-Newton methods are ubiquitous in deterministic local search due to their efficiency and low computational cost. This class of methods uses the history of gradient evaluations to approximate second-order derivatives. However, only…
The sparse pseudo-input Gaussian process (SPGP) is a new approximation method for speeding up GP regression in the case of a large number of data points N. The approximation is controlled by the gradient optimization of a small set of M…
We propose a novel stochastic smoothing accelerated gradient (SSAG) method for general constrained nonsmooth convex composite optimization, and analyze the convergence rates. The SSAG method allows various smoothing techniques, and can deal…
In this paper, we study and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for solving bilvel problems, when neither the upper/lower objective values, nor their unbiased gradient estimates are available. In particular, exploiting…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
Hard-thresholding is an important type of algorithm in machine learning that is used to solve $\ell_0$ constrained optimization problems. However, the true gradient of the objective function can be difficult to access in certain scenarios,…
In this paper, we propose and analyse a family of generalised stochastic composite mirror descent algorithms. With adaptive step sizes, the proposed algorithms converge without requiring prior knowledge of the problem. Combined with an…
In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for nonconvex minimax problems with coupled linear constraints under the deterministic and stochastic settings, which have attracted wide attention in machine learning, signal processing and…
We introduce a hybrid stochastic estimator to design stochastic gradient algorithms for solving stochastic optimization problems. Such a hybrid estimator is a convex combination of two existing biased and unbiased estimators and leads to…
We develop and analyze a set of new sequential simulation-optimization algorithms for large-scale multi-dimensional discrete optimization via simulation problems with a convexity structure. The "large-scale" notion refers to that the…
This paper investigates accelerating the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on non-convex problems. We propose a distributed primal-dual stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) equipped with "powerball" method to accelerate. We…
This review presents modern gradient-free methods to solve convex optimization problems. By gradient-free methods, we mean those that use only (noisy) realizations of the objective value. We are motivated by various applications where…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
A major challenge of applying zeroth-order (ZO) methods is the high query complexity, especially when queries are costly. We propose a novel gradient estimation technique for ZO methods based on adaptive lazy queries that we term as LAZO.…
Stochastic optimisation problems minimise expectations of random cost functions. We use 'optimise then discretise' method to solve stochastic optimisation. In our approach, accurate quadrature methods are required to calculate the…
Stochastic optimization algorithms update models with cheap per-iteration costs sequentially, which makes them amenable for large-scale data analysis. Such algorithms have been widely studied for structured sparse models where the sparsity…