Related papers: Private (Stochastic) Non-Convex Optimization Revis…
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.…
This paper considers the analysis of continuous time gradient-based optimization algorithms through the lens of nonlinear contraction theory. It demonstrates that in the case of a time-invariant objective, most elementary results on…
Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…
In this work, we introduce a novel stochastic second-order method, within the framework of a non-monotone trust-region approach, for solving the unconstrained, nonlinear, and non-convex optimization problems arising in the training of deep…
We consider the problem of finding stationary points in Bilevel optimization when the lower-level problem is unconstrained and strongly convex. The problem has been extensively studied in recent years; the main technical challenge is to…
We analyze stochastic conditional gradient methods for constrained optimization problems arising in over-parametrized machine learning. We show that one could leverage the interpolation-like conditions satisfied by such models to obtain…
In this paper, we study private optimization problems for non-smooth convex functions $F(x)=\mathbb{E}_i f_i(x)$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. We show that modifying the exponential mechanism by adding an $\ell_2^2$ regularizer to $F(x)$ and sampling…
We develop simple differentially private optimization algorithms that move along directions of (expected) descent to find an approximate second-order solution for nonconvex ERM. We use line search, mini-batching, and a two-phase strategy to…
We study a class of non-convex and non-smooth problems with \textit{rank} regularization to promote sparsity in optimal solution. We propose to apply the proximal gradient descent method to solve the problem and accelerate the process with…
Finding efficient, easily implementable differentially private (DP) algorithms that offer strong excess risk bounds is an important problem in modern machine learning. To date, most work has focused on private empirical risk minimization…
In the arena of privacy-preserving machine learning, differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has outstripped the objective perturbation mechanism in popularity and interest. Though unrivaled in versatility, DP-SGD…
Backtracking line-search is an old yet powerful strategy for finding a better step sizes to be used in proximal gradient algorithms. The main principle is to locally find a simple convex upper bound of the objective function, which in turn…
We consider the optimization of a quadratic objective function whose gradients are only accessible through a stochastic oracle that returns the gradient at any given point plus a zero-mean finite variance random error. We present the first…
In this paper, we investigate a class of constrained saddle point (SP) problems where the objective function is nonconvex-concave and smooth. This class of problems has wide applicability in machine learning, including robust multi-class…
We study a class of algorithms for solving bilevel optimization problems in both stochastic and deterministic settings when the inner-level objective is strongly convex. Specifically, we consider algorithms based on inexact implicit…
Minimax problems have achieved success in machine learning such as adversarial training, robust optimization, reinforcement learning. For theoretical analysis, current optimal excess risk bounds, which are composed by generalization error…
Trust-region (TR) and adaptive regularization using cubics (ARC) have proven to have some very appealing theoretical properties for non-convex optimization by concurrently computing function value, gradient, and Hessian matrix to obtain the…
In this paper, we consider a class of non-convex and non-smooth sparse optimization problems, which encompass most existing nonconvex sparsity-inducing terms. We show the second-order optimality conditions only depend on the nonzeros of the…
We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of…