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Machine learning problems such as neural network training, tensor decomposition, and matrix factorization, require local minimization of a nonconvex function. This local minimization is challenged by the presence of saddle points, of which…
We study strongly convex distributed optimization problems where a set of agents are interested in solving a separable optimization problem collaboratively. In this paper, we propose and study a two time-scale decentralized gradient descent…
We consider the problem of minimizing a smooth convex function by reducing the optimization to computing the Nash equilibrium of a particular zero-sum convex-concave game. Zero-sum games can be solved using online learning dynamics, where a…
(Stochastic) bilevel optimization is a frequently encountered problem in machine learning with a wide range of applications such as meta-learning, hyper-parameter optimization, and reinforcement learning. Most of the existing studies on…
Distributed nonconvex optimization problems underlie many applications in learning and autonomy, and such problems commonly face asynchrony in agents' computations and communications. When delays in these operations are bounded, they are…
Convex optimization problems arising in applications often have favorable objective functions and complicated constraints, thereby precluding first-order methods from being immediately applicable. We describe an approach that exchanges the…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems, where several machines act asynchronously in parallel while sharing a common memory. We propose a robust training method for the constrained setting and derive non asymptotic convergence…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…
We tackle the general differentiable meta learning problem that is ubiquitous in modern deep learning, including hyperparameter optimization, loss function learning, few-shot learning, invariance learning and more. These problems are often…
Machine learning algorithms in high-dimensional settings are highly susceptible to the influence of even a small fraction of structured outliers, making robust optimization techniques essential. In particular, within the…
In this work, we investigate the use of data-driven equation discovery for dynamical systems to model and forecast continuous-time dynamics of unconstrained optimization problems. To avoid expensive evaluations of the objective function and…
Optimization algorithms for wireless systems play a fundamental role in improving their performance and efficiency. However, it is known that the complexity of conventional optimization algorithms in the literature often exponentially…
This paper proposes and analyzes a communication-efficient distributed optimization framework for general nonconvex nonsmooth signal processing and machine learning problems under an asynchronous protocol. At each iteration, worker machines…
In this paper, we consider the problem of building learning agents that can efficiently learn to navigate in constrained environments. The main goal is to design agents that can efficiently learn to understand and generalize to different…
In practical applications of iterative first-order optimization, the learning rate schedule remains notoriously difficult to understand and expensive to tune. We demonstrate the presence of these subtleties even in the innocuous case when…
In this paper, we consider multi-stage stochastic optimization problems with convex objectives and conic constraints at each stage. We present a new stochastic first-order method, namely the dynamic stochastic approximation (DSA) algorithm,…
This paper considers time-average stochastic optimization, where a time average decision vector, an average of decision vectors chosen in every time step from a time-varying (possibly non-convex) set, minimizes a convex objective function…
This thesis reviews numerical optimization methods with machine learning problems in mind. Since machine learning models are highly parametrized, we focus on methods suited for high dimensional optimization. We build intuition on quadratic…
Pairwise learning is receiving increasing attention since it covers many important machine learning tasks, e.g., metric learning, AUC maximization, and ranking. Investigating the generalization behavior of pairwise learning is thus of…
Large-scale non-convex optimization problems are expensive to solve due to computational and memory costs. To reduce the costs, first-order (computationally efficient) and asynchronous-parallel (memory efficient) algorithms are necessary to…