Related papers: Escaping strict saddle points of the Moreau envelo…
Our work focuses on stochastic gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer. Research on this class of problem is quite limited, and until recently no non-asymptotic convergence…
We introduce two novel primal-dual algorithms for addressing nonconvex, nonconcave, and nonsmooth saddle point problems characterized by the weak Minty Variational Inequality (MVI). The first algorithm, Nonconvex-Nonconcave Primal-Dual…
We consider (stochastic) convex-concave saddle point (SP) problems with high-dimensional decision variables, arising in various applications including machine learning problems. To contend with the challenges in computing full gradients, we…
In this paper, we analyze gradient-free methods with one-point feedback for stochastic saddle point problems $\min_{x}\max_{y} \varphi(x, y)$. For non-smooth and smooth cases, we present analysis in a general geometric setup with arbitrary…
This work aims to solve a stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth composite optimization problem. Previous works on composite optimization problem requires the major part to satisfy Lipschitz smoothness or some relaxed smoothness conditions, which…
This paper considers continuous-time coordination algorithms for networks of agents that seek to collectively solve a general class of nonsmooth convex optimization problems with an inherent distributed structure. Our algorithm design…
We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…
Nonsmooth sparsity constrained optimization encompasses a broad spectrum of applications in machine learning. This problem is generally non-convex and NP-hard. Existing solutions to this problem exhibit several notable limitations,…
Constrained machine learning enables fairness-aware training, physics-informed neural networks, and integration of symbolic domain knowledge into statistical models. Despite its practical importance, no general method exists for the…
Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…
Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…
Two new stochastic variance-reduced algorithms named SARAH and SPIDER have been recently proposed, and SPIDER has been shown to achieve a near-optimal gradient oracle complexity for nonconvex optimization. However, the theoretical advantage…
Satisfaction of the strict saddle property has become a standard assumption in non-convex optimization, and it ensures that many first-order optimization algorithms will almost always escape saddle points. However, functions exist in…
Stochastic optimization lies at the core of most statistical learning models. The recent great development of stochastic algorithmic tools focused significantly onto proximal gradient iterations, in order to find an efficient approach for…
We develop an implementable stochastic proximal point (SPP) method for a class of weakly convex, composite optimization problems. The proposed stochastic proximal point algorithm incorporates a variance reduction mechanism and the resulting…
Many scientific and engineering applications feature nonsmooth convex minimization problems over convex sets. In this paper, we address an important instance of this broad class where we assume that the nonsmooth objective is equipped with…
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…
This work studies a class of non-smooth decentralized multi-agent optimization problems where the agents aim at minimizing a sum of local strongly-convex smooth components plus a common non-smooth term. We propose a general primal-dual…
We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…
While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…