Related papers: Private (Stochastic) Non-Convex Optimization Revis…
We study alternating first-order algorithms with no inner loops for solving nonconvex-strongly-concave min-max problems. We show the convergence of the alternating gradient descent--ascent algorithm method by proposing a substantially…
Differentially private (stochastic) gradient descent is the workhorse of DP private machine learning in both the convex and non-convex settings. Without privacy constraints, second-order methods, like Newton's method, converge faster than…
In this work, we study first-order algorithms for solving Bilevel Optimization (BO) where the objective functions are smooth but possibly nonconvex in both levels and the variables are restricted to closed convex sets. As a first step, we…
Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex…
We study the generalization performance of $\text{full-batch}$ optimization algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: these are first-order methods that only access the exact gradient of the empirical risk (rather than gradients with…
We give nearly matching upper and lower bounds on the oracle complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points ($\| \nabla F(x) \| \leq\epsilon$) in stochastic convex optimization. We jointly analyze the oracle complexity in both the local…
Adaptive gradient algorithms perform gradient-based updates using the history of gradients and are ubiquitous in training deep neural networks. While adaptive gradient methods theory is well understood for minimization problems, the…
Minimax problems of the form $\min_x \max_y \Psi(x,y)$ have attracted increased interest largely due to advances in machine learning, in particular generative adversarial networks. These are typically trained using variants of stochastic…
Recent applications that arise in machine learning have surged significant interest in solving min-max saddle point games. This problem has been extensively studied in the convex-concave regime for which a global equilibrium solution can be…
We study the running time, in terms of first order oracle queries, of differentially private empirical/population risk minimization of Lipschitz convex losses. We first consider the setting where the loss is non-smooth and the optimizer…
Driven by the need to solve increasingly complex optimization problems in signal processing and machine learning, there has been increasing interest in understanding the behavior of gradient-descent algorithms in non-convex environments.…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…
This paper proposes a differentially private gradient-tracking-based distributed stochastic optimization algorithm over directed graphs. In particular, privacy noises are incorporated into each agent's state and tracking variable to…
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…
There is a gap between finding a first-order stationary point (FOSP) and a second-order stationary point (SOSP) under differential privacy constraints, and it remains unclear whether privately finding an SOSP is more challenging than…
In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
A landmark result of non-smooth convex optimization is that gradient descent is an optimal algorithm whenever the number of computed gradients is smaller than the dimension $d$. In this paper we study the extension of this result to the…
We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…