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In machine learning, nonconvex optimization problems with multiple local optimums are often encountered. Graduated Optimization Algorithm (GOA) is a popular heuristic method to obtain global optimums of nonconvex problems through…
Learning representation from relative similarity comparisons, often called ordinal embedding, gains rising attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods are batch methods designed mainly based on the convex optimization, say, the…
The paper studies a distributed gradient descent (DGD) process and considers the problem of showing that in nonconvex optimization problems, DGD typically converges to local minima rather than saddle points. The paper considers…
Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization…
Distributed stochastic optimization, arising in the crossing and integration of traditional stochastic optimization, distributed computing and storage, and network science, has advantages of high efficiency and a low per-iteration…
We introduce a new sequential subspace optimization method for large-scale saddle-point problems. It solves iteratively a sequence of auxiliary saddle-point problems in low-dimensional subspaces, spanned by directions derived from…
The generalized Lasso is a remarkably versatile and extensively utilized model across a broad spectrum of domains, including statistics, machine learning, and image science. Among the optimization techniques employed to address the…
Variance reduced stochastic gradient (SGD) methods converge significantly faster than the vanilla SGD counterpart. However, these methods are not very practical on large scale problems, as they either i) require frequent passes over the…
Optimization and control of complex unsteady flows remains an important challenge due to the large cost of performing a function evaluation, i.e. a full computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. Reducing the number of required function…
We introduce a generic scheme to solve nonconvex optimization problems using gradient-based algorithms originally designed for minimizing convex functions. Even though these methods may originally require convexity to operate, the proposed…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has played a central role in machine learning. However, it requires a carefully hand-picked stepsize for fast convergence, which is notoriously tedious and time-consuming to tune. Over the last several…
Large-scale competitive market equilibrium problems arise in a wide range of important applications, including economic decision-making and intelligent manufacturing. Traditional solution methods, such as interior-point algorithms and…
Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in…
This paper considers decentralized optimization with application to machine learning on graphs. The growing size of neural network (NN) models has motivated prior works on decentralized stochastic gradient algorithms to incorporate…
Gradient descent is a popular algorithm in optimization, and its performance in convex settings is mostly well understood. In non-convex settings, it has been shown that gradient descent is able to escape saddle points asymptotically and…
In distributed machine learning, efficient training across multiple agents with different data distributions poses significant challenges. Even with a centralized coordinator, current algorithms that achieve optimal communication complexity…
Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) have been widely used for solving stochastic optimization problems. A majority of existing works assume no constraints or easy-to-project constraints. In this paper, we consider convex stochastic…
Decentralized optimization algorithms have attracted intensive interests recently, as it has a balanced communication pattern, especially when solving large-scale machine learning problems. Stochastic Path Integrated Differential Estimator…
A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…
In this paper, we study saddle point (SP) problems, focusing on convex-concave optimization involving functions that satisfy either two-sided quadratic functional growth (QFG) or two-sided quadratic gradient growth (QGG)--novel conditions…