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Difference of convex (DC) functions cover a broad family of non-convex and possibly non-smooth and non-differentiable functions, and have wide applications in machine learning and statistics. Although deterministic algorithms for DC…
Classical assumptions like strong convexity and Lipschitz smoothness often fail to capture the nature of deep learning optimization problems, which are typically non-convex and non-smooth, making traditional analyses less applicable. This…
We study nonlinearly preconditioned gradient methods for smooth nonconvex optimization problems, focusing on sigmoid preconditioners that inherently perform a form of gradient clipping akin to the widely used gradient clipping technique.…
In 1963, Polyak proposed a simple condition that is sufficient to show a global linear convergence rate for gradient descent. This condition is a special case of the \L{}ojasiewicz inequality proposed in the same year, and it does not…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
In this paper, we introduce both monotone and nonmonotone variants of LiBCoD, a \textbf{Li}nearized \textbf{B}lock \textbf{Co}ordinate \textbf{D}escent method for solving composite optimization problems. At each iteration, a random block is…
This paper focuses on stochastic methods for solving smooth non-convex strongly-concave min-max problems, which have received increasing attention due to their potential applications in deep learning (e.g., deep AUC maximization,…
Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…
Robust control seeks stabilizing policies that perform reliably under adversarial disturbances, with $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ control as a classical formulation. It is known that policy optimization of robust $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ control…
In this paper, we propose a unified convergence analysis for a class of generic shuffling-type gradient methods for solving finite-sum optimization problems. Our analysis works with any sampling without replacement strategy and covers many…
We study the convergence rate of gradient-based local search methods for solving low-rank matrix recovery problems with general objectives in both symmetric and asymmetric cases, under the assumption of the restricted isometry property.…
We consider a distributionally robust formulation of stochastic optimization problems arising in statistical learning, where robustness is with respect to uncertainty in the underlying data distribution. Our formulation builds on…
In this paper, we derive a new linear convergence rate for the gradient method with fixed step lengths for non-convex smooth optimization problems satisfying the Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality. We establish that the PL inequality is a…
Selecting the best hyperparameters for a particular optimization instance, such as the learning rate and momentum, is an important but nonconvex problem. As a result, iterative optimization methods such as hypergradient descent lack global…
The convergence behavior of gradient methods for minimizing convex differentiable functions is one of the core questions in convex optimization. This paper shows that their well-known complexities can be achieved under conditions weaker…
In this paper, we focus on providing convergence guarantees for stochastic subgradient methods in minimizing nonsmooth nonconvex functions. We first investigate the global stability of a general framework for stochastic subgradient methods,…
We propose a new first-order method for minimizing nonconvex functions with Lipschitz continuous gradients and H\"older continuous Hessians. The proposed algorithm is a heavy-ball method equipped with two particular restart mechanisms. It…
In this paper, we develop a unified framework able to certify both exponential and subexponential convergence rates for a wide range of iterative first-order optimization algorithms. To this end, we construct a family of parameter-dependent…
A recent breakthrough in nonconvex optimization is the online-to-nonconvex conversion framework of [Cutkosky et al., 2023], which reformulates the task of finding an $\varepsilon$-first-order stationary point as an online learning problem.…
Constrained optimization problems where both the objective and constraints may be nonsmooth and nonconvex arise across many learning and data science settings. In this paper, we show for any Lipschitz, weakly convex objectives and…