Related papers: Finding Second-Order Stationary Points in Nonconve…
This note studies numerical methods for solving compositional optimization problems, where the inner function is smooth, and the outer function is Lipschitz continuous, non-smooth, and non-convex but exhibits one of two special structures…
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…
In this paper we present an inexact zeroth-order method suitable for the solution nonsmooth and nonconvex stochastic composite optimization problems, in which the objective is split into a real-valued Lipschitz continuous stochastic…
This paper studies stochastic minimization of a finite-sum loss $ F (\mathbf{x}) = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{\xi=1}^N f(\mathbf{x};\xi) $. In many real-world scenarios, the Hessian matrix of such objectives exhibits a low-rank structure on a batch…
We establish or refute the optimality of inexact second-order methods for unconstrained nonconvex optimization from the point of view of worst-case evaluation complexity, improving and generalizing the results of Cartis, Gould and Toint…
In this paper, we study the problem of escaping from saddle points in smooth nonconvex optimization problems subject to a convex set $\mathcal{C}$. We propose a generic framework that yields convergence to a second-order stationary point of…
Nonnegative matrix factorization is the following problem: given a nonnegative input matrix $V$ and a factorization rank $K$, compute two nonnegative matrices, $W$ with $K$ columns and $H$ with $K$ rows, such that $WH$ approximates $V$ as…
We provide improved convergence rates for constrained convex-concave min-max problems and monotone variational inequalities with higher-order smoothness. In min-max settings where the $p^{th}$-order derivatives are Lipschitz continuous, we…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function so that along the iterations the objective function decreases. Such a simple principle allows to solve a large…
In this paper, we generalize (accelerated) Newton's method with cubic regularization under inexact second-order information for (strongly) convex optimization problems. Under mild assumptions, we provide global rate of convergence of these…
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…
This paper studies the stochastic nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax optimization over a multi-agent network. We propose an efficient algorithm, called Decentralized Recursive gradient descEnt Ascent Method (DREAM), which achieves the…
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…
This paper considers the problem for finding the $(\delta,\epsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point of Lipschitz continuous objective, which is a rich function class to cover a great number of important applications. We construct a zeroth-order…
Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a fundamental non-convex optimization problem with numerous applications in Machine Learning (music analysis, document clustering, speech-source separation etc). Despite having received extensive…
We provide a simple and flexible framework for designing differentially private algorithms to find approximate stationary points of non-convex loss functions. Our framework is based on using a private approximate risk minimizer to "warm…
We establish lower bounds on the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points of smooth, non-convex high-dimensional functions using first-order methods. We prove that deterministic first-order methods, even applied to arbitrarily…
Second-order methods are of great importance for composite convex optimization problems due to their local super-linear convergence rates (under appropriate assumptions). However, the presence of even a simple nonsmooth function in the…
Bilevel optimization minimizes an objective function, defined by an upper-level problem whose feasible region is the solution of a lower-level problem. We study the oracle complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point with…
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,…