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The Hessian-vector product has been utilized to find a second-order stationary solution with strong complexity guarantee (e.g., almost linear time complexity in the problem's dimensionality). In this paper, we propose to further reduce the…
Joint diagonalization, the process of finding a shared set of approximate eigenvectors for a collection of matrices, arises in diverse applications such as multidimensional harmonic analysis or quantum information theory. This task is…
A zeroth-order Hessian estimator aims to recover the Hessian matrix of an objective function at any given point, using minimal finite-difference computations. This paper studies zeroth-order Hessian estimation for low-rank Hessians, from a…
Second-order optimization uses curvature information about the objective function, which can help in faster convergence. However, such methods typically require expensive computation of the Hessian matrix, preventing their usage in a…
This paper develops negative curvature methods for continuous nonlinear unconstrained optimization in stochastic settings, in which function, gradient, and Hessian information is available only through probabilistic oracles, i.e., oracles…
Zeroth-order optimization is an important research topic in machine learning. In recent years, it has become a key tool in black-box adversarial attack to neural network based image classifiers. However, existing zeroth-order optimization…
An algorithm for unconstrained non-convex optimization is described, which does not evaluate the objective function and in which minimization is carried out, at each iteration, within a randomly selected subspace. It is shown that this…
In this paper, we propose algorithms that exploit negative curvature for solving noisy nonlinear nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. We consider both deterministic and stochastic inexact settings, and develop two-step algorithms…
We present a novel black box optimization algorithm called Hessian Estimation Evolution Strategy. The algorithm updates the covariance matrix of its sampling distribution by directly estimating the curvature of the objective function. This…
Efficiently approximating local curvature information of the loss function is a key tool for optimization and compression of deep neural networks. Yet, most existing methods to approximate second-order information have high computational or…
We consider escaping saddle points of nonconvex problems where only the function evaluations can be accessed. Although a variety of works have been proposed, the majority of them require either second or first-order information, and only a…
The loss function of deep networks is known to be non-convex but the precise nature of this nonconvexity is still an active area of research. In this work, we study the loss landscape of deep networks through the eigendecompositions of…
We propose and study an algorithm for computing a nearest passive system to a given non-passive linear time-invariant system (with much freedom in the choice of the metric defining `nearest', which may be restricted to structured…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…
A variety of dimensionality reduction techniques have been applied for computations involving large matrices. The underlying matrix is randomly compressed into a smaller one, while approximately retaining many of its original properties. As…
Nonlinear least-squares problems are a special class of unconstrained optimization problems in which their gradient and Hessian have special structures. In this paper, we exploit these structures and proposed a matrix-free algorithm with a…
In this paper, we consider stochastic second-order methods for minimizing a finite summation of nonconvex functions. One important key is to find an ingenious but cheap scheme to incorporate local curvature information. Since the true…
Zeroth-order optimization addresses problems where gradient information is inaccessible or impractical to compute. While most existing methods rely on first-order approximations, incorporating second-order (curvature) information can, in…
Minimization methods that search along a curvilinear path composed of a non-ascent nega- tive curvature direction in addition to the direction of steepest descent, dating back to the late 1970s, have been an effective approach to finding a…
Many problems of theoretical and practical interest involve finding an optimum over a family of convex functions. For instance, finding the projection on the convex functions in $H^k(\Omega)$, and optimizing functionals arising from some…