Related papers: Stochastic Variance-Reduced Majorization-Minimizat…
Given a nonsmooth, nonconvex minimization problem, we consider algorithms that iteratively sample and minimize stochastic convex models of the objective function. Assuming that the one-sided approximation quality and the variation of the…
We consider several classes of highly important semidefinite optimization problems that involve both a convex objective function (smooth or nonsmooth) and additional linear or nonlinear smooth and convex constraints, which are ubiquitous in…
Non-smooth optimization is a core ingredient of many imaging or machine learning pipelines. Non-smoothness encodes structural constraints on the solutions, such as sparsity, group sparsity, low-rank and sharp edges. It is also the basis for…
The computation of the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator for heteroscedastic regression models is considered. The traditional Newton algorithms for the problem require matrix multiplications and inversions, which are bottlenecks in modern…
In this paper, we consider nonconvex optimization problems with nonsmooth nonconvex objective function and nonlinear equality constraints. We assume that both the objective function and the functional constraints can be separated into 2…
We study a class of stochastic nonconvex optimization in the form of $\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}} F(x):=\mathbb{E}_\xi [f(\phi(x,\xi))]$, i.e., $F$ is a composition of a convex function $f$ and a random function $\phi$. Leveraging an (implicit)…
We propose a communication- and computation-efficient distributed optimization algorithm using second-order information for solving ERM problems with a nonsmooth regularization term. Current second-order and quasi-Newton methods for this…
Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…
The generalized alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) of Xiao et al. [{\tt Math. Prog. Comput., 2018}] aims at the two-block linearly constrained composite convex programming problem, in which each block is in the form of…
Support vector machines (SVMs) are an important tool in modern data analysis. Traditionally, support vector machines have been fitted via quadratic programming, either using purpose-built or off-the-shelf algorithms. We present an…
A framework based on iterative coordinate minimization (CM) is developed for stochastic convex optimization. Given that exact coordinate minimization is impossible due to the unknown stochastic nature of the objective function, the crux of…
Iterative majorize-minimize (MM) (also called optimization transfer) algorithms solve challenging numerical optimization problems by solving a series of "easier" optimization problems that are constructed to guarantee monotonic descent of…
In this paper, we consider non-convex stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) problems that have many applications in machine learning. Although numerous studies have proposed stochastic algorithms for solving these problems, they are limited…
We consider the problem of maximizing a monotone nondecreasing set function under multiple constraints, where the constraints are also characterized by monotone nondecreasing set functions. We propose two greedy algorithms to solve the…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
Flexible sparsity regularization means stably approximating sparse solutions of operator equations by using coefficient-dependent penalizations. We propose and analyse a general nonconvex approach in this respect, from both theoretical and…
The minimization of a nonconvex composite function can model a variety of imaging tasks. A popular class of algorithms for solving such problems are majorization-minimization techniques which iteratively approximate the composite nonconvex…
Consider convex optimization problems subject to a large number of constraints. We focus on stochastic problems in which the objective takes the form of expected values and the feasible set is the intersection of a large number of convex…
We propose a stochastic conditional gradient method (CGM) for minimizing convex finite-sum objectives formed as a sum of smooth and non-smooth terms. Existing CGM variants for this template either suffer from slow convergence rates, or…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…