Related papers: Debiasing a First-order Heuristic for Approximate …

Finite element based simulation of phenomena governed by partial differential equations is a standard tool in many engineering workflows today. However, the simulation of complex geometries is computationally expensive. Many engineering…

Brain storm optimization (BSO) is a newly proposed population-based optimization algorithm, which uses a logarithmic sigmoid transfer function to adjust its search range during the convergent process. However, this adjustment only varies…

In this paper, we propose systematic and efficient gradient-based methods for both one-way and two-way partial AUC (pAUC) maximization that are applicable to deep learning. We propose new formulations of pAUC surrogate objectives by using…

Optimization-based solvers play a central role in a wide range of signal processing and communication tasks. However, their applicability in latency-sensitive systems is limited by the sequential nature of iterative methods and the high…

In this paper, we study optimization methods consisting of iteratively minimizing surrogates of an objective function. By proposing several algorithmic variants and simple convergence analyses, we make two main contributions. First, we…

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) method across various domains. Recent research has increasingly focused on the role of token importance in improving DPO effectiveness.…

In this paper, we study a class of bilevel programming problem where the inner objective function is strongly convex. More specifically, under some mile assumptions on the partial derivatives of both inner and outer objective functions, we…

We exploit analogies between first-order algorithms for constrained optimization and non-smooth dynamical systems to design a new class of accelerated first-order algorithms for constrained optimization. Unlike Frank-Wolfe or projected…

This paper presents the design and analysis of a Hybrid High-Order (HHO) approximation for a distributed optimal control problem governed by the Poisson equation. We propose three distinct schemes to address unconstrained control problems…

Population-based methods are often used to solve multimodal optimization problems. By combining niching or clustering strategy, the state-of-the-art approaches generally divide the population into several subpopulations to find multiple…

Preference optimization is a critical post-training technique used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, typically by fine-tuning on ranked response pairs. While methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have…

We propose a new neural network based method for solving inverse problems for partial differential equations (PDEs) by formulating the PDE inverse problem as a bilevel optimization problem. At the upper level, we minimize the data loss with…

This paper proposes a new robust optimization (RO) formulation namely the RO under objective functional uncertainty (ObRO). The ObRO adopts a min-max structure where the inner problem finds the worst-case objective function in a continuous…

We present DuPO, a dual learning-based preference optimization framework that generates annotation-free feedback via a generalized duality. DuPO addresses two key limitations: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)'s reliance…

Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising approach for NP-hard problems. However, prevailing RL-based methods suffer from low sample efficiency due to sparse rewards and underused solutions. We propose Best-anchored…

A very simple first-order algorithm is proposed for solving nonlinear optimization problems with deterministic nonlinear equality constraints. This algorithm adaptively selects steps in the plane tangent to the constraints or steps that…

In this paper, we study a class of stochastic and finite-sum convex optimization problems with deterministic constraints. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-$expectedly\ feasible\ stochastic\ optimal$ solution, in which…

Recently, bi-level optimization (BLO) has taken center stage in some very exciting developments in the area of signal processing (SP) and machine learning (ML). Roughly speaking, BLO is a classical optimization problem that involves two…

Bilevel optimization is a hierarchical framework where an upper-level optimization problem is constrained by a lower-level problem, commonly used in machine learning applications such as hyperparameter optimization. Existing bilevel…

The convergence behaviour of first-order methods can be severely slowed down when applied to high-dimensional non-convex functions due to the presence of saddle points. If, additionally, the saddles are surrounded by large plateaus, it is…