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Risk minimization for nonsmooth nonconvex problems naturally leads to first-order sampling or, by an abuse of terminology, to stochastic subgradient descent. We establish the convergence of this method in the path-differentiable case and…
In this paper, we propose a proximal gradient method and an accelerated proximal gradient method for solving composite optimization problems, where the objective function is the sum of a smooth and a convex, possibly nonsmooth, function. We…
We study the trade-off between convergence rate and sensitivity to stochastic additive gradient noise for first-order optimization methods. Ordinary Gradient Descent (GD) can be made fast-and-sensitive or slow-and-robust by increasing or…
Deep neural networks (DNN) are typically optimized using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the estimation of the gradient using stochastic samples tends to be noisy and unreliable, resulting in large gradient variance and bad…
We propose dynamic sampled stochastic approximation (SA) methods for stochastic optimization with a heavy-tailed distribution (with finite 2nd moment). The objective is the sum of a smooth convex function with a convex regularizer.…
Optimization problems with continuous data appear in, e.g., robust machine learning, functional data analysis, and variational inference. Here, the target function is given as an integral over a family of (continuously) indexed target…
We provide a framework for computing the exact worst-case performance of any algorithm belonging to a broad class of oracle-based first-order methods for composite convex optimization, including those performing explicit, projected,…
This paper investigates a category of constrained fractional optimization problems that emerge in various practical applications. The objective function for this category is characterized by the ratio of a numerator and denominator, both…
This paper proposes a robust approximation method for solving chance constrained optimization (CCO) of polynomials. Assume the CCO is defined with an individual chance constraint that is affine in the decision variables. We construct a…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal…
High-probability analysis of stochastic first-order optimization methods under mild assumptions on the noise has been gaining a lot of attention in recent years. Typically, gradient clipping is one of the key algorithmic ingredients to…
Gradient dominance property is a condition weaker than strong convexity, yet sufficiently ensures global convergence even in non-convex optimization. This property finds wide applications in machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL),…
There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
In this paper, we study a class of deterministically constrained stochastic optimization problems. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-stochastic stationary point, where the expected violations of both constraints and…
We provide a novel computer-assisted technique for systematically analyzing first-order methods for optimization. In contrast with previous works, the approach is particularly suited for handling sublinear convergence rates and stochastic…
A stochastic-gradient-based interior-point algorithm for minimizing a continuously differentiable objective function (that may be nonconvex) subject to bound constraints is presented, analyzed, and demonstrated through experimental results.…
In this paper, we propose a new accelerated stochastic first-order method called clipped-SSTM for smooth convex stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed distributed noise in stochastic gradients and derive the first high-probability…
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
We consider a regularized expected reward optimization problem in the non-oblivious setting that covers many existing problems in reinforcement learning (RL). In order to solve such an optimization problem, we apply and analyze the…