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The primal--dual hybrid gradient method (PDHGM, also known as the Chambolle--Pock method) has proved very successful for convex optimization problems involving linear operators arising in image processing and inverse problems. In this…
The Barzilai-Borwein (BB) method has demonstrated great empirical success in nonlinear optimization. However, the convergence speed of BB method is not well understood, as the known convergence rate of BB method for quadratic problems is…
The proximal bundle method (PBM) is a powerful and widely used approach for minimizing nonsmooth convex functions. However, for smooth objectives, its best-known convergence rate remains suboptimal, and whether PBM can be accelerated…
Motivated by the conspicuous use of momentum-based algorithms in deep learning, we study a nonsmooth nonconvex stochastic heavy ball method and show its convergence. Our approach builds upon semialgebraic (definable) assumptions commonly…
Nonconvex optimization algorithms with random initialization have attracted increasing attention recently. It has been showed that many first-order methods always avoid saddle points with random starting points. In this paper, we answer a…
The usual approach to developing and analyzing first-order methods for smooth convex optimization assumes that the gradient of the objective function is uniformly smooth with some Lipschitz constant $L$. However, in many settings the…
We develop a distributed algorithm for convex Empirical Risk Minimization, the problem of minimizing large but finite sum of convex functions over networks. The proposed algorithm is derived from directly discretizing the second-order…
This paper studies the complexity of finding approximate stationary points for the smooth nonconvex-strongly-concave (NC-SC) saddle point problem: $\min_x\max_yf(x,y)$. Under the standard first-order smoothness conditions where $f$ is…
Conditional gradient, aka Frank Wolfe (FW) algorithms, have well-documented merits in machine learning and signal processing applications. Unlike projection-based methods, momentum cannot improve the convergence rate of FW, in general. This…
Constrained optimization problems where both the objective and constraints may be nonsmooth and nonconvex arise across many learning and data science settings. In this paper, we show for any Lipschitz, weakly convex objectives and…
In this work we establish the first linear convergence result for the stochastic heavy ball method. The method performs SGD steps with a fixed stepsize, amended by a heavy ball momentum term. In the analysis, we focus on minimizing the…
We consider a convex optimization problem with many linear inequality constraints. To deal with a large number of constraints, we provide a penalty reformulation of the problem, where the penalty is a variant of the one-sided Huber loss…
Accelerated gradient methods like Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient (NAG) achieve faster convergence on well-conditioned problems but often diverge on ill-conditioned or non-convex landscapes due to aggressive momentum accumulation. We…
We introduce the concept of strong high-order approximate minimizers for nonconvex optimization problems. These apply in both standard smooth and composite non-smooth settings, and additionally allow convex or inexpensive constraints. An…
We focus on nonconvex and nonsmooth minimization problems with a composite objective, where the differentiable part of the objective is freed from the usual and restrictive global Lipschitz gradient continuity assumption. This longstanding…
In this paper, we consider an unconstrained optimization model where the objective is a sum of a large number of possibly nonconvex functions, though overall the objective is assumed to be smooth and convex. Our bid to solving such model…
Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…
First-order optimization methods are crucial for solving large-scale data processing problems, particularly those involving convex non-smooth composite objectives. For such problems with convex non-smooth composite objectives, we introduce…
We study learning properties of accelerated gradient descent methods for linear least-squares in Hilbert spaces. We analyze the implicit regularization properties of Nesterov acceleration and a variant of heavy-ball in terms of…
The adaptive stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum has been widely adopted in deep learning as well as convex optimization. In practice, the last iterate is commonly used as the final solution to make decisions. However, the…