Related papers: Dueling Convex Optimization with General Preferenc…
Higher-order tensor methods were recently proposed for minimizing smooth convex and nonconvex functions. Higher-order algorithms accelerate the convergence of the classical first-order methods thanks to the higher-order derivatives used in…
We review basic concepts of convex duality, focusing on the very general and supremely useful Fenchel-Rockafellar duality. We summarize how this duality may be applied to a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) settings, including policy…
Autonomous agents must often deal with conflicting requirements, such as completing tasks using the least amount of time/energy, learning multiple tasks, or dealing with multiple opponents. In the context of reinforcement learning~(RL),…
This paper considers online convex optimization with time-varying constraint functions. Specifically, we have a sequence of convex objective functions $\{f_t(x)\}_{t=0}^{\infty}$ and convex constraint functions…
This paper studies simple bilevel problems, where a convex upper-level function is minimized over the optimal solutions of a convex lower-level problem. We first show the fundamental difficulty of simple bilevel problems, that the…
Optimization problems under affine constraints appear in various areas of machine learning. We consider the task of minimizing a smooth strongly convex function F(x) under the affine constraint Kx=b, with an oracle providing evaluations of…
We consider strongly convex-concave minimax problems in the federated setting, where the communication constraint is the main bottleneck. When clients are arbitrarily heterogeneous, a simple Minibatch Mirror-prox achieves the best…
We study the problems of distributed online and bandit convex optimization against an adaptive adversary. We aim to minimize the average regret on $M$ machines working in parallel over $T$ rounds with $R$ intermittent communications.…
In this paper we consider a distributed optimization scenario in which a set of agents has to solve a convex optimization problem with separable cost function, local constraint sets and a coupling inequality constraint. We propose a novel…
The usual approach to developing and analyzing first-order methods for smooth convex optimization assumes that the gradient of the objective function is uniformly smooth with some Lipschitz constant $L$. However, in many settings the…
In this paper, a distributed optimization problem with general differentiable convex objective functions is studied for single-integrator and double-integrator multi-agent systems. Two distributed adaptive optimization algorithm is…
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 a simple but general online learning framework in which a learner plays against an adversary in a vector-valued game that changes every round. Even though the learner's objective is not convex-concave (and so the minimax…
Optimization methods are at the core of many problems in signal/image processing, computer vision, and machine learning. For a long time, it has been recognized that looking at the dual of an optimization problem may drastically simplify…
Regularized empirical risk minimization with constrained labels (in contrast to fixed labels) is a remarkably general abstraction of learning. For common loss and regularization functions, this optimization problem assumes the form of a…
We propose a general scheme for solving convex and non-convex optimization problems on manifolds. The central idea is that, by adding a multiple of the squared retraction distance to the objective function in question, we "convexify" the…
In this paper, we consider gradient methods for minimizing smooth convex functions, which employ the information obtained at the previous iterations in order to accelerate the convergence towards the optimal solution. This information is…
Boosting is a popular way to derive powerful learners from simpler hypothesis classes. Following previous work (Mason et al., 1999; Friedman, 2000) on general boosting frameworks, we analyze gradient-based descent algorithms for boosting…
This paper develops a fast distributed algorithm, termed \emph{DEXTRA}, to solve the optimization problem when~$n$ agents reach agreement and collaboratively minimize the sum of their local objective functions over the network, where the…
This article studies problems of optimal transport, by embedding them in a general functional analytic framework of convex optimization. This provides a unified treatment of a large class of related problems in probability theory and allows…