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In this paper, we develop a novel {\bf ho}moto{\bf p}y {\bf s}moothing (HOPS) algorithm for solving a family of non-smooth problems that is composed of a non-smooth term with an explicit max-structure and a smooth term or a simple…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-11-04 Yi Xu , Yan Yan , Qihang Lin , Tianbao Yang

We study the problem of minimizing a strongly convex, smooth function when we have noisy estimates of its gradient. We propose a novel multistage accelerated algorithm that is universally optimal in the sense that it achieves the optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-29 Necdet Serhat Aybat , Alireza Fallah , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Asuman Ozdaglar

Nested sampling is an iterative integration procedure that shrinks the prior volume towards higher likelihoods by removing a "live" point at a time. A replacement point is drawn uniformly from the prior above an ever-increasing likelihood…

Computation · Statistics 2014-12-03 Johannes Buchner

Sampling from nonsmooth target probability distributions is essential in various applications, including the Bayesian Lasso. We propose a splitting-based sampling algorithm for the time-implicit discretization of the probability flow for…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-14 Fuqun Han , Stanley Osher , Wuchen Li

Sampling from unnormalized target distributions is a fundamental yet challenging task in machine learning and statistics. Existing sampling algorithms typically require many iterative steps to produce high-quality samples, leading to high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Pascal Jutras-Dubé , Patrick Pynadath , Ruqi Zhang

Standard complexity analyses for weakly convex optimization rely on the Moreau envelope technique proposed by Davis and Drusvyatskiy (2019). The main insight is that nonsmooth algorithms, such as proximal subgradient, proximal point, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-27 Qi Deng , Wenzhi Gao

We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-29 Rohit Kannan , James Luedtke

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-09 Keita Kume , Isao Yamada

In the context of state-space models, skeleton-based smoothing algorithms rely on a backward sampling step which by default has a $\mathcal O(N^2)$ complexity (where $N$ is the number of particles). Existing improvements in the literature…

Computation · Statistics 2023-03-08 Hai-Dang Dau , Nicolas Chopin

"Particle methods" are sequential Monte Carlo algorithms, typically involving importance sampling, that are used to estimate and sample from joint and marginal densities from a collection of a, presumably increasing, number of random…

Computation · Statistics 2014-07-17 J. N. Corcoran , D. Jennings

Bayesian inference with nested sampling requires a likelihood-restricted prior sampling method, which draws samples from the prior distribution that exceed a likelihood threshold. For high-dimensional problems, Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

Computation · Statistics 2023-02-13 Johannes Buchner

We propose a novel algorithm for solving non-convex, nonlinear equality-constrained finite-sum optimization problems. The proposed algorithm incorporates an additional sampling strategy for sample size update into the well-known framework…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-05 Nataša Krejić , Nataša Krklec Jerinkić , Tijana Ostojić , Nemanja Vučićević

Science and engineering problems subject to uncertainty are frequently both computationally expensive and feature nonsmooth parameter dependence, making standard Monte Carlo too slow, and excluding efficient use of accelerated uncertainty…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-10-01 Per Pettersson , Sebastian Krumscheid

We propose a new algorithm---Stochastic Proximal Langevin Algorithm (SPLA)---for sampling from a log concave distribution. Our method is a generalization of the Langevin algorithm to potentials expressed as the sum of one stochastic smooth…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-17 Adil Salim , Dmitry Kovalev , Peter Richtárik

We propose a manifold sampling algorithm for minimizing a nonsmooth composition $f= h\circ F$, where we assume $h$ is nonsmooth and may be inexpensively computed in closed form and $F$ is smooth but its Jacobian may not be available. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-14 Jeffrey Larson , Matt Menickelly , Baoyu Zhou

We introduce a new framework for analyzing (Quasi-}Newton type methods applied to non-smooth optimization problems. The source of randomness comes from the evaluation of the (approximation) of the Hessian. We derive, using a variant of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-05 Titus Pinta

In this work, we analyze an efficient sampling-based algorithm for general-purpose reachability analysis, which remains a notoriously challenging problem with applications ranging from neural network verification to safety analysis of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-15 Thomas Lew , Lucas Janson , Riccardo Bonalli , Marco Pavone

Classical analysis of convex and non-convex optimization methods often requires the Lipshitzness of the gradient, which limits the analysis to functions bounded by quadratics. Recent work relaxed this requirement to a non-uniform smoothness…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-06 Haochuan Li , Jian Qian , Yi Tian , Alexander Rakhlin , Ali Jadbabaie

In this paper, we discuss the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: a smooth function plus a non-smooth function. Further, the smooth part can be expressed by the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-17 Luo Luo , Zihao Chen , Zhihua Zhang , Wu-Jun Li

Our work focuses on stochastic gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer. Research on this class of problem is quite limited, and until recently no non-asymptotic convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-15 Michael R. Metel , Akiko Takeda