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We consider stochastic optimization when one only has access to biased stochastic oracles of the objective and the gradient, and obtaining stochastic gradients with low biases comes at high costs. This setting captures various optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-22 Yifan Hu , Jie Wang , Xin Chen , Niao He

We lower bound the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm at most $\epsilon$) using stochastic first-order methods. In a well-studied model where algorithms access smooth, potentially non-convex functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-01 Yossi Arjevani , Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi , Dylan J. Foster , Nathan Srebro , Blake Woodworth

We investigate the information complexity of mixed-integer convex optimization under different types of oracles. We establish new lower bounds for the standard first-order oracle, improving upon the previous best known lower bound. This…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-23 Amitabh Basu , Hongyi Jiang , Phillip Kerger , Marco Molinaro

Decentralized optimization to minimize a finite sum of functions over a network of nodes has been a significant focus within control and signal processing research due to its natural relevance to optimal control and signal estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Ran Xin , Shi Pu , Angelia Nedić , Usman A. Khan

The convergence behavior of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is highly sensitive to the batch size and learning rate settings. Recent theoretical studies have identified the existence of a critical batch size that minimizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Hikaru Umeda , Hideaki Iiduka

Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-28 Dar Gilboa , Sam Buchanan , John Wright

Motivated by applications in machine learning and operations research, we study regret minimization with stochastic first-order oracle feedback in online constrained, and possibly non-smooth, non-convex problems. In this setting, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-14 Nadav Hallak , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Volkan Cevher

We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Arya Akhavan , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

In this paper, we consider gradient methods for minimizing smooth convex functions, which employ the information obtained at the previous iterations in order to accelerate the convergence towards the optimal solution. This information is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-02 Yurii Nesterov , Mihai I. Florea

In continual learning, knowledge must be preserved and re-used between tasks, maintaining good transfer to future tasks and minimizing forgetting of previously learned ones. While several practical algorithms have been devised for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Lior Friedman , Ron Meir

We obtain sharp oracle inequalities for the empirical risk minimization procedure in the regression model under the assumption that the target Y and the model F are subgaussian. The bound we obtain is sharp in the minimax sense if F is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-09-20 Guillaume Lecué , Shahar Mendelson

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Kaiyi Ji

Algorithmic reproducibility measures the deviation in outputs of machine learning algorithms upon minor changes in the training process. Previous work suggests that first-order methods would need to trade-off convergence rate (gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-11 Liang Zhang , Junchi Yang , Amin Karbasi , Niao He

Min-max optimization is emerging as a key framework for analyzing problems of robustness to strategically and adversarially generated data. We propose a random reshuffling-based gradient free Optimistic Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithm for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-22 Chinmay Maheshwari , Chih-Yuan Chiu , Eric Mazumdar , S. Shankar Sastry , Lillian J. Ratliff

We introduce the concept of inexact first-order oracle of degree q for a possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth function, which naturally appears in the context of approximate gradient, weak level of smoothness and other situations. Our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-22 Yassine Nabou , Francois Glineur , Ion Necoara

Large-scale constrained optimization problems are at the core of many tasks in control, signal processing, and machine learning. Notably, problems with functional constraints arise when, beyond a performance{\nobreakdash-}centric goal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-15 Antesh Upadhyay , Sang Bin Moon , Abolfazl Hashemi

We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of convex functions. The applications include empirical risk minimization problems in statistical machine learning where the datasets are large and have to be stored on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-01-07 Jason D. Lee , Qihang Lin , Tengyu Ma , Tianbao Yang

Understanding and analyzing markets is crucial, yet analytical equilibrium solutions remain largely infeasible. Recent breakthroughs in equilibrium computation rely on zeroth-order policy gradient estimation. These approaches commonly…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Nils Kohring , Fabian R. Pieroth , Martin Bichler

Differentially private empirical risk minimization (DP-ERM) is a fundamental problem in private optimization. While the theory of DP-ERM is well-studied, as large-scale models become prevalent, traditional DP-ERM methods face new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Yin Tat Lee , Daogao Liu , Zhou Lu

We develop minimax optimal risk bounds for the general learning task consisting in predicting as well as the best function in a reference set $\mathcal{G}$ up to the smallest possible additive term, called the convergence rate. When the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-09-09 Jean-Yves Audibert