Related papers: Local and Global Convergence of General Burer-Mont…
Local search heuristics for non-convex optimizations are popular in applied machine learning. However, in general it is hard to guarantee that such algorithms even converge to a local minimum, due to the existence of complicated saddle…
High-order tensor methods that employ Taylor-based local models (of degree $p\ge 3$) within adaptive regularization frameworks have been recently proposed for both convex and nonconvex optimization problems. They have been shown to have…
Machine learning algorithms typically perform optimization over a class of non-convex functions. In this work, we provide bounds on the fundamental hardness of identifying the global minimizer of a non convex function. Specifically, we…
In this paper we investigate the convergence of a recently popular class of first-order primal-dual algorithms for saddle point problems under the presence of errors occurring in the proximal maps and gradients. We study several types of…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
Gradient-related first-order methods have become the workhorse of large-scale numerical optimization problems. Many of these problems involve nonconvex objective functions with multiple saddle points, which necessitates an understanding of…
Unsupervised learning aims at the discovery of hidden structure that drives the observations in the real world. It is essential for success in modern machine learning. Latent variable models are versatile in unsupervised learning and have…
Minimizing a convex function of a measure with a sparsity-inducing penalty is a typical problem arising, e.g., in sparse spikes deconvolution or two-layer neural networks training. We show that this problem can be solved by discretizing the…
Gradient descent and its variants are widely used in machine learning. However, oracle access of gradient may not be available in many applications, limiting the direct use of gradient descent. This paper proposes a method of estimating…
In nonsmooth optimization, a negative subgradient is not necessarily a descent direction, making the design of convergent descent methods based on zeroth-order and first-order information a challenging task. The well-studied bundle methods…
We study a generalized nonconvex Burer-Monteiro formulation for low-rank minimization problems. We use recent results on non-Euclidean first order methods to provide efficient and scalable algorithms. Our approach uses geometries induced by…
The use of min-max optimization in adversarial training of deep neural network classifiers and training of generative adversarial networks has motivated the study of nonconvex-nonconcave optimization objectives, which frequently arise in…
Nonconvex optimization problems arise in many areas of computational science and engineering and are (approximately) solved by a variety of algorithms. Existing algorithms usually only have local convergence or subsequence convergence of…
This paper considers the minimization of a general objective function $f(X)$ over the set of rectangular $n\times m$ matrices that have rank at most $r$. To reduce the computational burden, we factorize the variable $X$ into a product of…
We provide novel theoretical results regarding local optima of regularized $M$-estimators, allowing for nonconvexity in both loss and penalty functions. Under restricted strong convexity on the loss and suitable regularity conditions on the…
A subgradient method is presented for solving general convex optimization problems, the main requirement being that a strictly-feasible point is known. A feasible sequence of iterates is generated, which converges to within user-specified…
The convergence of many numerical optimization techniques is highly dependent on the initial guess given to the solver. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach that utilizes tensor methods to initialize existing optimization…
We propose a bilinear decomposition for the Burer-Monteiro method and combine it with the standard Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers algorithm for semidefinite programming. Bilinear decomposition reduces the degree of the…
In this paper we study the auxiliary problems that appear in $p$-order tensor methods for unconstrained minimization of convex functions with $\nu$-H\"{o}lder continuous $p$th derivatives. This type of auxiliary problems corresponds to the…
Higher-order tensor methods were recently proposed for minimizing smooth convex and nonconvex functions. Higher-order algorithms accelerate the convergence of the classical first-order methods thanks to the higher-order derivatives used in…