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In this paper, we analyze the mirror descent algorithm for non-smooth optimization problems in which the objective function is relatively strongly convex, without relying on the standard Lipschitz continuity assumption commonly used in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Mohammad S. Alkousa , Fedor S. Stonyakin

Low-rank matrix estimation under heavy-tailed noise is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs, especially since robust loss…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-12 Yinan Shen , Jingyang Li , Jian-Feng Cai , Dong Xia

Gradient clipping has long been considered essential for ensuring the convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the presence of heavy-tailed gradient noise. In this paper, we revisit this belief and explore whether gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Tao Sun , Xinwang Liu , Kun Yuan

Various optimal gradient-based algorithms have been developed for smooth nonconvex optimization. However, many nonconvex machine learning problems do not belong to the class of smooth functions and therefore the existing algorithms are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-27 Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang , Zhaosong Lu

The paper is devoted to new modifications of recently proposed adaptive methods of Mirror Descent for convex minimization problems in the case of several convex functional constraints. Methods for problems of two classes are considered. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-29 Fedor S. Stonyakin , Mohammad S. Alkousa , Alexey N. Stepanov , Maxim A. Barinov

We introduce a new zeroth-order algorithm for private stochastic optimization on nonconvex and nonsmooth objectives. Given a dataset of size $M$, our algorithm ensures $(\alpha,\alpha\rho^2/2)$-R\'enyi differential privacy and finds a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-01 Qinzi Zhang , Hoang Tran , Ashok Cutkosky

Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Haishan Ye

Zeroth-order optimization methods are developed to overcome the practical hurdle of having knowledge of explicit derivatives. Instead, these schemes work with merely access to noisy functions evaluations. One of the predominant approaches…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-22 Wouter Jongeneel

Gradient clipping is a commonly used technique to stabilize the training process of neural networks. A growing body of studies has shown that gradient clipping is a promising technique for dealing with the heavy-tailed behavior that emerged…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-26 Shaojie Li , Yong Liu

We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-12-19 Yaodong Yu , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

Stochastic optimization is fundamental to modern machine learning. Recent research has extended the study of stochastic first-order methods (SFOMs) from light-tailed to heavy-tailed noise, which frequently arises in practice, with clipping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Chuan He

Online and stochastic gradient methods have emerged as potent tools in large scale optimization with both smooth convex and nonsmooth convex problems from the classes $C^{1,1}(\reals^p)$ and $C^{1,0}(\reals^p)$ respectively. However to our…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2014-10-30 Ziqiang Shi , Rujie Liu

We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function for which derivatives are unavailable, and a convex, nonsmooth function with easy-to-evaluate proximal operator. Of particular focus is the case where the smooth…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-23 Yanjun Liu , Kevin H. Lam , Lindon Roberts

In this paper, we propose a proximal gradient method and an accelerated proximal gradient method for solving composite optimization problems, where the objective function is the sum of a smooth and a convex, possibly nonsmooth, function. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-22 Raghu Bollapragada , Shagun Gupta

We develop a new primitive for stochastic optimization: a low-bias, low-cost estimator of the minimizer $x_\star$ of any Lipschitz strongly-convex function. In particular, we use a multilevel Monte-Carlo approach due to Blanchet and Glynn…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-29 Hilal Asi , Yair Carmon , Arun Jambulapati , Yujia Jin , Aaron Sidford

Due to the non-smoothness of optimization problems in Machine Learning, generalized smoothness assumptions have been gaining a lot of attention in recent years. One of the most popular assumptions of this type is $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-30 Eduard Gorbunov , Nazarii Tupitsa , Sayantan Choudhury , Alen Aliev , Peter Richtárik , Samuel Horváth , Martin Takáč

This paper considers stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method for solving constrained convex minimization problems. In particular, a stochastic subgradient mirror-descent method with weighted iterate-averaging is investigated and its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-07-09 Angelia Nedich , Soomin Lee

In Online Convex Optimization (OCO), when the stochastic gradient has a finite variance, many algorithms provably work and guarantee a sublinear regret. However, limited results are known if the gradient estimate has a heavy tail, i.e., the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zijian Liu

In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the sum of nonconvex and possibly nonsmooth functions over a connected multi-agent network, where the agents have partial knowledge about the global cost function and can only access the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-10 Davood Hajinezhad , Michael Zavlanos

This work considers stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function values can only be computed by a blackbox corrupted by some random noise following an unknown distribution. The proposed method is based on sequential…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Charles Audet , Jean Bigeon , Romain Couderc , Michael Kokkolaras