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We consider the classical setting of optimizing a nonsmooth Lipschitz continuous convex function over a convex constraint set, when having access to a (stochastic) first-order oracle (FO) for the function and a projection oracle (PO) for…
We study the optimization of non-convex functions that are not necessarily smooth (gradient and/or Hessian are Lipschitz) using first order methods. Smoothness is a restrictive assumption in machine learning in both theory and practice,…
This paper presents an extension of stochastic gradient descent for the minimization of Lipschitz continuous loss functions. Our motivation is for use in non-smooth non-convex stochastic optimization problems, which are frequently…
Choosing the optimization algorithm that performs best on a given machine learning problem is often delicate, and there is no guarantee that current state-of-the-art algorithms will perform well across all tasks. Consequently, the more…
We develop a line-search second-order algorithmic framework for minimizing finite sums. We do not make any convexity assumptions, but require the terms of the sum to be continuously differentiable and have Lipschitz-continuous gradients.…
We consider stochastic gradient descent algorithms for minimizing a non-smooth, strongly-convex function. Several forms of this algorithm, including suffix averaging, are known to achieve the optimal $O(1/T)$ convergence rate in…
Traditional algorithms for stochastic optimization require projecting the solution at each iteration into a given domain to ensure its feasibility. When facing complex domains, such as positive semi-definite cones, the projection operation…
We study unconstrained optimization problems of nonsmooth, nonconvex Lipschitz functions, using only noisy pairwise comparisons governed by a known link function. Our goal is to compute a $(\delta,\varepsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point.…
Supported by the recent contributions in multiple branches, the first-order splitting algorithms became central for structured nonsmooth optimization. In the large-scale or noisy contexts, when only stochastic information on the smooth part…
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…
We introduce two algorithms for nonconvex regularized finite sum minimization, where typical Lipschitz differentiability assumptions are relaxed to the notion of relative smoothness. The first one is a Bregman extension of Finito/MISO,…
We propose a novel stochastic smoothing accelerated gradient (SSAG) method for general constrained nonsmooth convex composite optimization, and analyze the convergence rates. The SSAG method allows various smoothing techniques, and can deal…
We consider global efficiency of algorithms for minimizing a sum of a convex function and a composition of a Lipschitz convex function with a smooth map. The basic algorithm we rely on is the prox-linear method, which in each iteration…
This paper considers stochastic convex optimization problems with smooth functional constraints arising in constrained estimation and robust signal recovery. We operate in the high-dimensional and highly-constrained setting, where oracle…
We propose a new first-order method for minimizing nonconvex functions with Lipschitz continuous gradients and H\"older continuous Hessians. The proposed algorithm is a heavy-ball method equipped with two particular restart mechanisms. It…
We propose a proximal variable smoothing algorithm for a nonsmooth optimization problem whose cost function is the sum of three functions including a weakly convex composite function. The proposed algorithm has a single-loop structure…
In the paper, we generalize the approach Gasnikov et. al, 2017, which allows to solve (stochastic) convex optimization problems with an inexact gradient-free oracle, to the convex-concave saddle-point problem. The proposed approach works,…
In this paper, we consider the general non-oblivious stochastic optimization where the underlying stochasticity may change during the optimization procedure and depends on the point at which the function is evaluated. We develop Stochastic…
Nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems broadly emerge in machine learning and business decision making, whereas two core challenges impede the development of efficient solution methods with finite-time convergence guarantee: the lack of…
We propose a unifying algorithm for non-smooth non-convex optimization. The algorithm approximates the objective function by a convex model function and finds an approximate (Bregman) proximal point of the convex model. This approximate…