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One of the major bottlenecks for deploying popular first-order differentially private (DP) machine learning algorithms (e.g., DP-SGD) lies in their high computation and memory cost, despite the existence of optimized implementations.…
In this paper we consider convex optimization problems with stochastic composite objective function subject to (possibly) infinite intersection of constraints. The objective function is expressed in terms of expectation operator over a sum…
First-order methods for stochastic optimization have undeniable relevance, in part due to their pivotal role in machine learning. Variance reduction for these algorithms has become an important research topic. In contrast to common…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…
Conditional stochastic optimization covers a variety of applications ranging from invariant learning and causal inference to meta-learning. However, constructing unbiased gradient estimators for such problems is challenging due to the…
Stochastic First-Order (SFO) methods have been a cornerstone in addressing a broad spectrum of modern machine learning (ML) challenges. However, their efficacy is increasingly questioned, especially in large-scale applications where…
Despite the great achievements of the modern deep neural networks (DNNs), the vulnerability/robustness of state-of-the-art DNNs raises security concerns in many application domains requiring high reliability. Various adversarial attacks are…
In the paper, we propose a class of accelerated stochastic gradient-free and projection-free (a.k.a., zeroth-order Frank-Wolfe) methods to solve the constrained stochastic and finite-sum nonconvex optimization. Specifically, we propose an…
First-order algorithms have been popular for solving convex and non-convex optimization problems. A key assumption for the majority of these algorithms is that the gradient of the objective function is globally Lipschitz continuous, but…
We propose an enhanced zeroth-order stochastic Frank-Wolfe framework to address constrained finite-sum optimization problems, a structure prevalent in large-scale machine-learning applications. Our method introduces a novel double variance…
We study mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints, in which a leader knows their own cost function, but lacks a model of the followers' response. Instead, the leader can only query this response at specific points. While this…
This paper considers a consensus optimization problem, where all the nodes in a network, with access to the zeroth-order information of its local objective function only, attempt to cooperatively achieve a common minimizer of the sum of…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
The complexity in large-scale optimization can lie in both handling the objective function and handling the constraint set. In this respect, stochastic Frank-Wolfe algorithms occupy a unique position as they alleviate both computational…
Black-box algorithms are designed to optimize functions without relying on their underlying analytical structure or gradient information, making them essential when gradients are inaccessible or difficult to compute. Traditional methods for…
This work provides the first finite-time convergence guarantees for linearly constrained stochastic bilevel optimization using only first-order methods, requiring solely gradient information without any Hessian computations or second-order…
Federated optimization, an emerging paradigm which finds wide real-world applications such as federated learning, enables multiple clients (e.g., edge devices) to collaboratively optimize a global function. The clients do not share their…
This paper investigates zeroth-order (ZO) finite-sum composite optimization. Recently, variance reduction techniques have been applied to ZO methods to mitigate the non-vanishing variance of 2-point estimators in constrained/composite…