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In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for nonconvex minimax problems with coupled linear constraints under the deterministic and stochastic settings, which have attracted wide attention in machine learning, signal processing and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-06 Huiling Zhang , Zi Xu , Yuhong Dai

In this paper, we utilize stochastic optimization to reduce the space complexity of convex composite optimization with a nuclear norm regularizer, where the variable is a matrix of size $m \times n$. By constructing a low-rank estimate of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-12-08 Lijun Zhang , Tianbao Yang , Rong Jin , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Wanli Shi , Hongchang Gao , Bin Gu

This work considers the non-convex finite sum minimization problem. There are several algorithms for such problems, but existing methods often work poorly when the problem is badly scaled and/or ill-conditioned, and a primary goal of this…

Min-max problems have broad applications in machine learning, including learning with non-decomposable loss and learning with robustness to data distribution. Convex-concave min-max problem is an active topic of research with efficient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-12 Hassan Rafique , Mingrui Liu , Qihang Lin , Tianbao Yang

We use a rank one Gaussian perturbation to derive a smooth stochastic approximation of the maximum eigenvalue function. We then combine this smoothing result with an optimal smooth stochastic optimization algorithm to produce an efficient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-03-05 Alexandre d'Aspremont , Noureddine El Karoui

Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-13 Xiyu Yu , Dacheng Tao

We propose and analyze a randomized zeroth-order approach based on approximating the exact gradient byfinite differences computed in a set of orthogonal random directions that changes with each iteration. A number ofpreviously proposed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-16 David Kozak , Cesare Molinari , Lorenzo Rosasco , Luis Tenorio , Silvia Villa

This paper investigates a category of constrained fractional optimization problems that emerge in various practical applications. The objective function for this category is characterized by the ratio of a numerator and denominator, both…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Yizun Lin , Jian-Feng Cai , Zhao-Rong Lai , Cheng Li

We consider in this paper a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. We present a new class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-10-27 Guanghui Lan

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-13 Hanyang Li , Ying Cui

There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-27 Jinshan Zeng , Ke Ma , Yuan Yao

Successive quadratic approximations, or second-order proximal methods, are useful for minimizing functions that are a sum of a smooth part and a convex, possibly nonsmooth part that promotes regularization. Most analyses of iteration…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-01-25 Ching-pei Lee , Stephen J. Wright

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

We study the problem of estimating low-rank matrices from linear measurements (a.k.a., matrix sensing) through nonconvex optimization. We propose an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve a nonconvex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-01-17 Xiao Zhang , Lingxiao Wang , Quanquan Gu

We consider stochastic variational inequality problems where the mapping is monotone over a compact convex set. We present two robust variants of stochastic extragradient algorithms for solving such problems. Of these, the first scheme…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-03-25 Farzad Yousefian , Angelia Nedic , Uday V. Shanbhag

Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda

We propose an adaptive smoothing algorithm based on Nesterov's smoothing technique in \cite{Nesterov2005c} for solving "fully" nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems. Our method combines both Nesterov's accelerated proximal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-07-05 Quoc Tran-Dinh

We propose a class of very simple modifications of gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent. We show that when applied to a large variety of machine learning problems, ranging from logistic regression to deep neural nets, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-30 Stanley Osher , Bao Wang , Penghang Yin , Xiyang Luo , Farzin Barekat , Minh Pham , Alex Lin

We develop model-based methods for solving stochastic convex optimization problems, introducing the approximate-proximal point, or aProx, family, which includes stochastic subgradient, proximal point, and bundle methods. When the modeling…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-20 Hilal Asi , John C. Duchi