Related papers: Fast First-Order Methods for Monotone Strongly DR-…
We study the problem of maximizing a continuous DR-submodular function that is not necessarily smooth. We prove that the continuous greedy algorithm achieves an $[(1-1/e)\OPT-\epsilon]$ guarantee when the function is monotone and…
Decentralized learning has been studied intensively in recent years motivated by its wide applications in the context of federated learning. The majority of previous research focuses on the offline setting in which the objective function is…
In recent years, maximization of DR-submodular continuous functions became an important research field, with many real-worlds applications in the domains of machine learning, communication systems, operation research and economics. Most of…
We study when the \emph{optimization curve} of first-order methods -- the sequence \${f(x\_n)}*{n\ge0}\$ produced by constant-stepsize iterations -- is convex, equivalently when the forward differences \$f(x\_n)-f(x*{n+1})\$ are…
Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…
We show that the exact worst-case performance of fixed-step first-order methods for unconstrained optimization of smooth (possibly strongly) convex functions can be obtained by solving convex programs. Finding the worst-case performance of…
Over the last two decades, submodular function maximization has been the workhorse of many discrete optimization problems in machine learning applications. Traditionally, the study of submodular functions was based on binary function…
In this paper, we study a class of online optimization problems with long-term budget constraints where the objective functions are not necessarily concave (nor convex) but they instead satisfy the Diminishing Returns (DR) property.…
In this paper, we revisit the online non-monotone continuous DR-submodular maximization problem over a down-closed convex set, which finds wide real-world applications in the domain of machine learning, economics, and operations research.…
In this paper, we show that if the optimization function is restricted-strongly-convex (RSC) and restricted-smooth (RSM) -- a rich subclass of weakly submodular functions -- then a streaming algorithm with constant factor approximation…
This paper presents a directional proximal point method (DPPM) to derive the minimum of any C1-smooth function f. The proposed method requires a function persistent a local convex segment along the descent direction at any non-critical…
This paper optimizes the step coefficients of first-order methods for smooth convex minimization in terms of the worst-case convergence bound (i.e., efficiency) of the decrease in the gradient norm. This work is based on the performance…
We consider the problem of maximizing non-negative non-decreasing set functions. Although most of the recent work focus on exploiting submodularity, it turns out that several objectives we encounter in practice are not submodular.…
Submodularity is one of the most well-studied properties of problem classes in combinatorial optimization and many applications of machine learning and data mining, with strong implications for guaranteed optimization. In this thesis, we…
We study the convergence of the shuffling gradient method, a popular algorithm employed to minimize the finite-sum function with regularization, in which functions are passed to apply (Proximal) Gradient Descent (GD) one by one whose order…
Constrained optimization problems where both the objective and constraints may be nonsmooth and nonconvex arise across many learning and data science settings. In this paper, we show for any Lipschitz, weakly convex objectives and…
We address the problem of minimizing a convex smooth function $f(x)$ over a compact polyhedral set $D$ given a stochastic zeroth-order constraint feedback model. This problem arises in safety-critical machine learning applications, such as…
We introduce prox-convex for minimizing $F(x)=g(x)+h(C(x))+s(R(x))$, where $g$ and $h$ are convex, $C$ and $s$ are smooth, and each component of $R$ is convex (possibly nonsmooth). Here $g$ captures general convex objectives and indicator…
This paper considers stochastic convex optimization problems with two sets of constraints: (a) deterministic constraints on the domain of the optimization variable, which are difficult to project onto; and (b) deterministic or stochastic…
Submodular function minimization is well studied, and existing algorithms solve it exactly or up to arbitrary accuracy. However, in many applications, such as structured sparse learning or batch Bayesian optimization, the objective function…