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We consider minimization of functions that are compositions of convex or prox-regular functions (possibly extended-valued) with smooth vector functions. A wide variety of important optimization problems fall into this framework. We describe…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-04-24 A. S. Lewis , S. J. Wright

We consider the unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is composed of a smooth and a non-smooth conponents where the smooth component is the expectation a random function. This type of problem arises in some interesting…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2011-07-01 Qihang Lin , Xi Chen , Javier Pena

This paper considers non-smooth optimization problems where we seek to minimize the pointwise maximum of a continuously parameterized family of functions. Since the objective function is given as the solution to a maximization problem,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-12 Dimitris Boskos , Jorge Cortés , Sonia Martínez

Despite its important applications in Machine Learning, min-max optimization of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives remains elusive. Not only are there no known first-order methods converging even to approximate local min-max points, but the…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Constantinos Daskalakis , Stratis Skoulakis , Manolis Zampetakis

We study a class of nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problems in which the inner maximization problem satisfies a local Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) condition that may vary with the outer minimization variable. In contrast to the global KL or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-20 Zhaosong Lu , Xiangyuan Wang

This paper considers the distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by a sum of local cost functions by using local information exchange. We first consider a distributed first-order primal-dual…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-26 Xinlei Yi , Shengjun Zhang , Tao Yang , Tianyou Chai , Karl H. Johansson

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-24 Samet Uzun , Dayou Luo , Behçet Açıkmeşe , Aleksandr Y. Aravkin

Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ oracle complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Haoyuan Cai , Sulaiman A. Alghunaim , Ali H. Sayed

Optimizing non-convex functions is a fundamental challenge across machine learning and combinatorial optimization. We introduce and study $\gamma$-weakly $\theta$-up-concavity, a novel first-order condition that characterizes a broad class…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Mohammad Pedramfar , Vaneet Aggarwal

We study a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems in which the objective is a sum of two functions: One function is the average of a large number of differentiable functions, while the other function is proper, lower…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-12 Duy-Nhat Phan , Sedi Bartz , Nilabja Guha , Hung M. Phan

This paper considers the nonconvex nonsmooth problem in which the objective function is Lipschitz continuous. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access stochastic function value evaluations with heavy-tailed noise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

In this paper, we analyze the mirror descent algorithm for non-smooth optimization problems in which the objective function is relatively strongly convex, without relying on the standard Lipschitz continuity assumption commonly used in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Mohammad S. Alkousa , Fedor S. Stonyakin

This paper develops a unified high-order accumulative regularization (AR) framework for convex and uniformly convex gradient norm minimization. Existing high-order methods often exhibit a gap: the function-value residual decreases fast,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-13 Yao Ji , Guanghui Lan

We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Arya Akhavan , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

Many optimization problems arising in high-dimensional statistics decompose naturally into a sum of several terms, where the individual terms are relatively simple but the composite objective function can only be optimized with iterative…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-06-30 Rina Foygel Barber , Emil Y. Sidky

This paper deals with convex nonsmooth optimization problems. We introduce a general smooth approximation framework for the original function and apply random (accelerated) coordinate descent methods for minimizing the corresponding smooth…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-10 Flavia Chorobura , Ion Necoara

For the composite multi-objective optimization problem composed of two nonsmooth terms, a smoothing method is used to overcome the nonsmoothness of the objective function, making the objective function contain at most one nonsmooth term.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 Huang Chengzhi

Randomized smoothing is a widely adopted technique for optimizing nonsmooth objective functions. However, its efficiency analysis typically relies on global Lipschitz continuity, a condition rarely met in practical applications. To address…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-10 Jingfan Xia , Zhenwei Lin , Qi Deng

We consider max-min and min-max problems with objective functions that are possibly non-smooth, submodular with respect to the minimiser and concave with respect to the maximiser. We investigate the performance of a zeroth-order method…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-29 Amir Ali Farzin , Yuen-Man Pun , Philipp Braun , Tyler Summers , Iman Shames

In this paper we consider a nonconvex optimization problem with nonlinear equality constraints. We assume that both, the objective function and the functional constraints, are locally smooth. For solving this problem, we propose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-02 Lahcen El Bourkhissi , Ion Necoara