Related papers: Using second-order information in gradient samplin…
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,…
Zeroth-order optimization, which does not use derivative information, is one of the significant research areas in the field of mathematical optimization and machine learning. Although various studies have explored zeroth-order algorithms,…
Inspired by Gauss-Newton-like methods, we study the benefit of leveraging the structure of deep learning objectives, namely, the composition of a convex loss function and of a nonlinear network, in order to derive better direction oracles…
We propose a family of optimization methods that achieve linear convergence using first-order gradient information and constant step sizes on a class of convex functions much larger than the smooth and strongly convex ones. This larger…
It has long been a goal to efficiently compute and use second order information on a function ($f$) to assist in numerical approximations. Here it is shown how, using only basic physics and a numerical approximation, such information can be…
This paper addresses the study of a new class of nonsmooth optimization problems, where the objective is represented as a difference of two generally nonconvex functions. We propose and develop a novel Newton-type algorithm to solving such…
In this paper we propose a generalized condition for a sharp minimum, somewhat similar to the inexact oracle proposed recently by Devolder-Glineur-Nesterov. The proposed approach makes it possible to extend the class of applicability of…
We address the problem of learning an unknown smooth function and its derivatives from noisy pointwise evaluations under the supremum norm. While classical nonparametric regression provides a strong theoretical foundation, traditional…
In this paper, we propose objective-function-free (OFF) variants of the proximal Newton method for nonconvex composite optimization problems and the regularized Newton method for unconstrained optimization problems, respectively, using…
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…
This paper deals with composite optimization problems having the objective function formed as the sum of two terms, one has Lipschitz continuous gradient along random subspaces and may be nonconvex and the second term is simple and…
This paper tackles the unconstrained minimization of a class of nonsmooth and nonconvex functions that can be written as finite max-functions. A gradient and function-based sampling method is proposed which, under special circumstances,…
We present an optimization algorithm that can identify a global minimum of a potentially nonconvex smooth function with high probability, assuming the Gibbs measure of the potential satisfies a logarithmic Sobolev inequality. Our…
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
Exploiting higher-order derivatives in convex optimization is known at least since 1970's. In each iteration higher-order (also called tensor) methods minimize a regularized Taylor expansion of the objective function, which leads to faster…
This paper considers the distributed convex-concave minimax optimization under the second-order similarity. We propose stochastic variance-reduced optimistic gradient sliding (SVOGS) method, which takes the advantage of the finite-sum…
In this paper, we prove new complexity bounds for zeroth-order methods in non-convex optimization with inexact observations of the objective function values. We use the Gaussian smoothing approach of Nesterov and Spokoiny [2015] and extend…
We propose a communication- and computation-efficient distributed optimization algorithm using second-order information for solving ERM problems with a nonsmooth regularization term. Current second-order and quasi-Newton methods for this…
In this paper we propose a variant of the random coordinate descent method for solving linearly constrained convex optimization problems with composite objective functions. If the smooth part of the objective function has Lipschitz…
Recently, Stochastic Variational Inference (SVI) has been increasingly attractive thanks to its ability to find good posterior approximations of probabilistic models. It optimizes the variational objective with stochastic optimization,…