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In this paper, we propose a first second-order scheme based on arbitrary non-Euclidean norms, incorporated by Bregman distances. They are introduced directly in the Newton iterate with regularization parameter proportional to the square…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-07 Nikita Doikov , Yurii Nesterov

In this work, we study the iteration complexity of gradient methods for minimizing convex quadratic functions regularized by powers of Euclidean norms. We show that, due to the uniform convexity of the objective, gradient methods have…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-28 Daniel Berg Thomsen , Nikita Doikov

We present high-probability (and expectation) complexity bounds for two versions of stochastic adaptive regularization methods with cubics (SARC), also known as regularized Newton methods. The first algorithm aims to find first-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-23 Katya Scheinberg , Miaolan Xie

We present a midpoint policy iteration algorithm to solve linear quadratic optimal control problems in both model-based and model-free settings. The algorithm is a variation of Newton's method, and we show that in the model-based setting it…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-16 Benjamin Gravell , Iman Shames , Tyler Summers

Finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point of a nonconvex function with a Lipschitz continuous Hessian is a central problem in optimization. Regularized Newton methods are a classical tool and have been studied extensively, yet they still face…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-03 Yuhao Zhou , Jintao Xu , Bingrui Li , Chenglong Bao , Chao Ding , Jun Zhu

In this work, we generalized and unified two recent completely different works of~\cite{shi2015large} and~\cite{cartis2012adaptive} respectively into one by proposing the cyclic incremental Newton-type gradient descent with cubic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-18 Ziqiang Shi

A new variant of Newton's method for empirical risk minimization is studied, where at each iteration of the optimization algorithm, the gradient and Hessian of the objective function are replaced by robust estimators taken from existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Eirini Ioannou , Muni Sreenivas Pydi , Po-Ling Loh

A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-06-11 Yann Dauphin , Razvan Pascanu , Caglar Gulcehre , Kyunghyun Cho , Surya Ganguli , Yoshua Bengio

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Cubic regularization (CR) is an optimization method with emerging popularity due to its capability to escape saddle points and converge to second-order stationary solutions for nonconvex optimization. However, CR encounters a high sample…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-10 Zhe Wang , Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang , Guanghui Lan

The cubic regularized Newton method of Nesterov and Polyak has become increasingly popular for non-convex optimization because of its capability of finding an approximate local solution with second-order guarantee. Several recent works…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-11-29 Junyu Zhang , Lin Xiao , Shuzhong Zhang

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

Improving the sample efficiency in reinforcement learning has been a long-standing research problem. In this work, we aim to reduce the sample complexity of existing policy gradient methods. We propose a novel policy gradient algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Pan Xu , Felicia Gao , Quanquan Gu

Many data-fitting applications require the solution of an optimization problem involving a sum of large number of functions of high dimensional parameter. Here, we consider the problem of minimizing a sum of $n$ functions over a convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-29 Farbod Roosta-Khorasani , Michael W. Mahoney

We propose a distributed, cubic-regularized Newton method for large-scale convex optimization over networks. The proposed method requires only local computations and communications and is suitable for federated learning applications over…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-08 César A. Uribe , Ali Jadbabaie

In this paper, we use Proximal Cubic regularized Newton Methods (PCNM) to optimize the sum of a smooth convex function and a non-smooth convex function, where we use inexact gradient and Hessian, and an inexact subsolver for the cubic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-27 Chaobing Song , Ji Liu , Yong Jiang

We here adapt an extended version of the adaptive cubic regularisation method with dynamic inexact Hessian information for nonconvex optimisation in [3] to the stochastic optimisation setting. While exact function evaluations are still…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-09-15 Stefania Bellavia , Gianmarco Gurioli

In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Elita A. Lobo , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Marek Petrik

An algorithm for solving smooth nonconvex optimization problems is proposed that, in the worst-case, takes $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ iterations to drive the norm of the gradient of the objective function below a prescribed positive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-16 Frank E. Curtis , Daniel P. Robinson , Mohammadreza Samadi

We extend the standard notion of self-concordance to non-convex optimization and develop a family of second-order algorithms with global convergence guarantees. In particular, two function classes -- \textit{weakly self-concordant}…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Donald Goldfarb , Lexiao Lai , Tianyi Lin , Jiayu Zhang