Related papers: An apocalypse-free first-order low-rank optimizati…
We study the problem of minimizing a sum of local objective convex functions over a network of processors/agents. This problem naturally calls for distributed optimization algorithms, in which the agents cooperatively solve the problem…
We study the problem of solving strongly convex and smooth unconstrained optimization problems using stochastic first-order algorithms. We devise a novel algorithm, referred to as Recursive One-Over-T SGD (ROOT-SGD), based on an easily…
We derive several numerical methods for designing optimized first-order algorithms in unconstrained convex optimization settings. Our methods are based on the Performance Estimation Problem (PEP) framework, which casts the worst-case…
We provide a framework for computing the exact worst-case performance of any algorithm belonging to a broad class of oracle-based first-order methods for composite convex optimization, including those performing explicit, projected,…
Many modern machine learning applications - from online principal component analysis to covariance matrix identification and dictionary learning - can be formulated as minimization problems on Riemannian manifolds, and are typically solved…
Recent applications that arise in machine learning have surged significant interest in solving min-max saddle point games. This problem has been extensively studied in the convex-concave regime for which a global equilibrium solution can be…
We propose a single time-scale stochastic subgradient method for constrained optimization of a composition of several nonsmooth and nonconvex functions. The functions are assumed to be locally Lipschitz and differentiable in a generalized…
Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…
In this paper we introduce a novel abstract descent scheme suited for the minimization of proper and lower semicontinuous functions. The proposed abstract scheme generalizes a set of properties that are crucial for the convergence of…
The goal of the paper is to design sequential strategies which lead to efficient optimization of an unknown function under the only assumption that it has a finite Lipschitz constant. We first identify sufficient conditions for the…
Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ oracle complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary…
In this paper, we study the problem of solving a simple bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective is minimized over the solution set of the lower-level problem. We focus on the general setting in which both the upper-…
We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function given quantum access to a stochastic gradient oracle. We provide two new methods for the special case of minimizing a Lipschitz convex function. Each method obtains a dimension…
We study the first-order convex optimization problem, where we have black-box access to a (not necessarily smooth) function $f:\mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ and its (sub)gradient. Our goal is to find an $\epsilon$-approximate minimum of $f$…
We provide an explicit construction and direct proof for the lower bound on the number of first order oracle accesses required for a randomized algorithm to minimize a convex Lipschitz function.
In this paper, we propose a new non-monotone line-search method for smooth unconstrained optimization problems with objective functions that have many non-global local minimizers. The method is based on a relaxed Armijo condition that…
In this paper, we develop and analyze sub-sampled trust-region methods for solving finite-sum optimization problems. These methods employ subsampling strategies to approximate the gradient and Hessian of the objective function,…
We present an accelerated gradient method for non-convex optimization problems with Lipschitz continuous first and second derivatives. The method requires time $O(\epsilon^{-7/4} \log(1/ \epsilon) )$ to find an $\epsilon$-stationary point,…
We consider the case of derivative-free algorithms for non-convex optimization, also known as zero order algorithms, that use only function evaluations rather than gradients. For a wide variety of gradient approximators based on finite…
Optimization problems with rank constraints arise in many applications, including matrix regression, structured PCA, matrix completion and matrix decomposition problems. An attractive heuristic for solving such problems is to factorize the…