Related papers: Minimizing a low-dimensional convex function over …

This paper presents a stochastic block-coordinate proximal Newton method for minimizing the sum of a blockwise Lipschitz-continuously differentiable function and a separable nonsmooth convex function. At each iteration, the method randomly…

Fourier extension is an approximation method that alleviates the periodicity requirements of Fourier series and avoids the Gibbs phenomenon when approximating functions. We describe a similar extension approach using regular wavelet bases…

We study minimization of a structured objective function, being the sum of a smooth function and a composition of a weakly convex function with a linear operator. Applications include image reconstruction problems with regularizers that…

The main result of the present theoretical paper is an original decomposition formula for the proximal operator of the sum of two proper, lower semicontinuous and convex functions $f$ and $g$. For this purpose, we introduce a new operator,…

Maximizing a DR-submodular function subject to a general convex set is an NP-hard problem arising from many applications in combinatorial optimization and machine learning. While it is highly desirable to design efficient approximation…

We consider the problem of optimizing an approximately convex function over a bounded convex set in $\mathbb{R}^n$ using only function evaluations. The problem is reduced to sampling from an \emph{approximately} log-concave distribution…

The matrix logarithm, when applied to Hermitian positive definite matrices, is concave with respect to the positive semidefinite order. This operator concavity property leads to numerous concavity and convexity results for other matrix…

The problem of finding the minimizer of a sum of convex functions is central to the field of optimization. Thus, it is of interest to understand how that minimizer is related to the properties of the individual functions in the sum. In this…

We extend the work of Narasimhan and Bilmes [30] for minimizing set functions representable as a difference between submodular functions. Similar to [30], our new algorithms are guaranteed to monotonically reduce the objective function at…

In this paper, we establish two minimax theorems for functions $f:X\times I\to {\bf R}$, where $I$ is a real interval, without assuming that $f(x,\cdot)$ is quasi-concave. Also, some related applications are presented.

We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function over the intersection of finitely many simple sets which are easy to project onto. This is an important problem arising in various domains such as machine learning. The main difficulty…

In this paper we consider finite sum composite convex optimization problems with many functional constraints. The objective function is expressed as a finite sum of two terms, one of which admits easy computation of (sub)gradients while the…

This paper proposes a universal algorithm for convex minimization problems of the composite form $g_0(x)+h(g_1(x),\dots, g_m(x)) + u(x)$. We allow each $g_j$ to independently range from being nonsmooth Lipschitz to smooth, from convex to…

We study the convergence rate of the proximal-gradient homotopy algorithm applied to norm-regularized linear least squares problems, for a general class of norms. The homotopy algorithm reduces the regularization parameter in a series of…

In this paper we build provably near-optimal, in the minimax sense, estimates of linear forms and, more generally, "$N$-convex functionals" (the simplest example being the maximum of several fractional-linear functions) of unknown "signal"…

This paper studies first order methods for solving smooth minimax optimization problems $\min_x \max_y g(x,y)$ where $g(\cdot,\cdot)$ is smooth and $g(x,\cdot)$ is concave for each $x$. In terms of $g(\cdot,y)$, we consider two settings --…

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to speed-up the convergence of accelerated proximal gradient (APG) methods. In order to minimize a convex function $f(\mathbf{x})$, our algorithm introduces a simple line search step after each…

DR-submodular functions encompass a broad class of functions which are generally non-convex and non-concave. We study the problem of minimizing any DR-submodular function, with continuous and general integer variables, under box constraints…

A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…

We propose Frank--Wolfe (FW) algorithms with an adaptive Bregman step-size strategy for smooth adaptable (also called: relatively smooth) (weakly-) convex functions. This means that the gradient of the objective function is not necessarily…