Related papers: A clustering heuristic to improve a derivative-fre…
This paper studies distributed nonconvex optimization problems with stochastic gradients for a multi-agent system, in which each agent aims to minimize the sum of all agents' cost functions by using local compressed information exchange. We…
In this work we focus on efficient heuristics for solving a class of stochastic planning problems that arise in a variety of business, investment, and industrial applications. The problem is best described in terms of future buy and sell…
We introduce a novel distributed derivative-free optimization framework that is resilient to stragglers. The proposed method employs coded search directions at which the objective function is evaluated, and a decoding step to find the next…
The goal of this paper is to investigate an approach for derivative-free optimization that has not received sufficient attention in the literature and is yet one of the simplest to implement and parallelize. It consists of computing…
We propose an improved evolution strategy (ES) using a novel nonlocal gradient operator for high-dimensional black-box optimization. Standard ES methods with $d$-dimensional Gaussian smoothing suffer from the curse of dimensionality due to…
The paper proposes and develops new globally convergent algorithms of the generalized damped Newton type for solving important classes of nonsmooth optimization problems. These algorithms are based on the theory and calculations of…
This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…
Clustering algorithms have regained momentum with recent popularity of data mining and knowledge discovery approaches. To obtain good clustering in reasonable amount of time, various meta-heuristic approaches and their hybridization,…
Distributed optimization utilizes local computation and communication to realize a global aim of optimizing the sum of local objective functions. This article addresses a class of constrained distributed nonconvex optimization problems…
Decentralized optimization is a powerful paradigm that finds applications in engineering and learning design. This work studies decentralized composite optimization problems with non-smooth regularization terms. Most existing gradient-based…
Similarity-based clustering methods separate data into clusters according to the pairwise similarity between the data, and the pairwise similarity is crucial for their performance. In this paper, we propose {\em Clustering by Discriminative…
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…
In this paper, we propose a sampling algorithm based on state-of-the-art statistical machine learning techniques to obtain conditional nonlinear optimal perturbations (CNOPs), which is different from traditional (deterministic) optimization…
Stochastic gradient descent algorithms for training linear and kernel predictors are gaining more and more importance, thanks to their scalability. While various methods have been proposed to speed up their convergence, the model selection…
We propose a new random method to minimize deterministic continuous functions over subsets $\mathcal{S}$ of high-dimensional space $\mathbb{R}^K$ without assuming convexity. Our procedure alternates between a Global Search (GS) regime to…
Clustering is a data analysis method for extracting knowledge by discovering groups of data called clusters. Among these methods, state-of-the-art density-based clustering methods have proven to be effective for arbitrary-shaped clusters.…
We study binary optimization problems of the form \( \min_{x\in\{-1,1\}^n} f(Ax-b) \) with possibly nonsmooth loss \(f\). Following the lifted rank-one semidefinite programming (SDP) approach\cite{qian2023matrix}, we develop a…
To reduce complexity and achieve scalable performance in high-dimensional black-box settings, we propose a distributed method for nonconvex derivative-free optimization of continuous variables with an additively separable objective, subject…
We present a new algorithm for probabilistic planning with no observability. Our algorithm, called Probabilistic-FF, extends the heuristic forward-search machinery of Conformant-FF to problems with probabilistic uncertainty about both the…
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…