Related papers: On the Convergence Theory for Hessian-Free Bilevel…
Due to the hierarchical structure of many machine learning problems, bilevel programming is becoming more and more important recently, however, the complicated correlation between the inner and outer problem makes it extremely challenging…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
This paper proposes several novel optimization algorithms for minimizing a nonlinear objective function. The algorithms are enlightened by the optimal state trajectory of an optimal control problem closely related to the minimized objective…
We study a general class of bilevel problems, consisting in the minimization of an upper-level objective which depends on the solution to a parametric fixed-point equation. Important instances arising in machine learning include…
Machine learning (ML) problems are often posed as highly nonlinear and nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. Methods for solving ML problems based on stochastic gradient descent are easily scaled for very large problems but may…
Newton's method is the most widespread high-order method, demanding the gradient and the Hessian of the objective function. However, one of the main disadvantages of Newtons method is its lack of global convergence and high iteration cost.…
Stochastic second-order methods achieve fast local convergence in strongly convex optimization by using noisy Hessian estimates to precondition the gradient. However, these methods typically reach superlinear convergence only when the…
This paper studies simple bilevel problems, where a convex upper-level function is minimized over the optimal solutions of a convex lower-level problem. We first show the fundamental difficulty of simple bilevel problems, that the…
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 recent years, various subspace algorithms have been developed to handle large-scale optimization problems. Although existing subspace Newton methods require fewer iterations to converge in practice, the matrix operations and full…
Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…
In this work, we study nonconvex-strongly convex online bilevel optimization (OBO) using only first-order oracle. Existing OBO algorithms are mainly based on hypergradient descent, which requires access to a Hessian-vector product (HVP)…
Bilevel optimization, a hierarchical optimization paradigm, has gained significant attention in a wide range of practical applications, notably in the fine-tuning of generative models. However, due to the nested problem structure, most…
In this paper, we focus on simple bilevel optimization problems, where we minimize a convex smooth objective function over the optimal solution set of another convex smooth constrained optimization problem. We present a novel bilevel…
We study a class of bilevel convex optimization problems where the goal is to find the minimizer of an objective function in the upper level, among the set of all optimal solutions of an optimization problem in the lower level. A wide range…
Zeroth-order optimization is an important research topic in machine learning. In recent years, it has become a key tool in black-box adversarial attack to neural network based image classifiers. However, existing zeroth-order optimization…
We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…
We propose a second-order (Hessian or Hessian-free) based optimization method for variational inference inspired by Gaussian backpropagation, and argue that quasi-Newton optimization can be developed as well. This is accomplished by…
The emergence of big data has caused a dramatic shift in the operating regime for optimization algorithms. The performance bottleneck, which used to be computations, is now often communications. Several gradient compression techniques have…
Hessian-free training has become a popular parallel second or- der optimization technique for Deep Neural Network training. This study aims at speeding up Hessian-free training, both by means of decreasing the amount of data used for…