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This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Anik Kumar Paul , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We study the training dynamics of gradient descent in a softmax self-attention layer trained to perform linear regression and show that a simple first-order optimization algorithm can converge to the globally optimal self-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Gautam Goel , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Peter Bartlett

This paper studies non-smooth problems of convex stochastic optimization. Using the smoothing technique based on the replacement of the function value at the considered point by the averaged function value over a ball (in $l_1$-norm or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-23 Aleksandr Lobanov , Belal Alashqar , Darina Dvinskikh , Alexander Gasnikov

Recently Grimmer [1] showed for smooth convex optimization by utilizing longer steps periodically, gradient descent's textbook $LD^2/2T$ convergence guarantees can be improved by constant factors, conjecturing an accelerated rate strictly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-28 Benjamin Grimmer , Kevin Shu , Alex L. Wang

We prove the first convergence guarantees for a subgradient method minimizing a generic Lipschitz function over generic Lipschitz inequality constraints. No smoothness or convexity (or weak convexity) assumptions are made. Instead, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-16 Benjamin Grimmer , Zhichao Jia

In this paper some adaptive mirror descent algorithms for problems of minimization convex objective functional with several convex Lipschitz (generally, non-smooth) functional constraints are considered. It is shown that the methods are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-20 F. S. Stonyakin , M . S. Alkousa , A. A. Titov

We prove lower bounds for higher-order methods in smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization. Our contribution is threefold: We first show that a deterministic algorithm cannot profit from the finite-sum structure of the objective, and that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-05 Nicolas Emmenegger , Rasmus Kyng , Ahad N. Zehmakan

It was recently established that for convex optimization problems with sparse optimal solutions (be it entry-wise sparsity or matrix rank-wise sparsity) it is possible to design first-order methods with linear convergence rates that depend…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-20 Dan Garber

Adam-type methods, the extension of adaptive gradient methods, have shown great performance in the training of both supervised and unsupervised machine learning models. In particular, Adam-type optimizers have been widely used empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Zehao Dou , Yuanzhi Li

To improve the robustness of deep classifiers against adversarial perturbations, many approaches have been proposed, such as designing new architectures with better robustness properties (e.g., Lipschitz-capped networks), or modifying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Mahyar Fazlyab , Taha Entesari , Aniket Roy , Rama Chellappa

Despite its important applications in Machine Learning, min-max optimization of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives remains elusive. Not only are there no known first-order methods converging even to approximate local min-max points, but the…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Constantinos Daskalakis , Stratis Skoulakis , Manolis Zampetakis

Conditional stochastic optimization covers a variety of applications ranging from invariant learning and causal inference to meta-learning. However, constructing unbiased gradient estimators for such problems is challenging due to the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Yifan Hu , Siqi Zhang , Xin Chen , Niao He

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

A vast literature on convergence guarantees for gradient descent and derived methods exists at the moment. However, a simple practical situation remains unexplored: when a fixed step size is used, can we expect gradient descent to converge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Alexandru Crăciun , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar

We investigate the stochastic optimization problem of minimizing population risk, where the loss defining the risk is assumed to be weakly convex. Compositions of Lipschitz convex functions with smooth maps are the primary examples of such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-19 Damek Davis , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy

Preconditioning is a crucial operation in gradient-based numerical optimisation. It helps decrease the local condition number of a function by appropriately transforming its gradient. For a convex function, where the gradient can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-29 Dmitrii A. Pasechnyuk , Alexander Gasnikov , Martin Takáč

In this paper, we study higher-order-accurate-in-time minimizing movements schemes for Wasserstein gradient flows. We introduce a novel accelerated second-order scheme, leveraging the differential structure of the Wasserstein space in both…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Raymond Chu , Matt Jacobs

Gradient descent and coordinate descent are well understood in terms of their asymptotic behavior, but less so in a transient regime often used for approximations in machine learning. We investigate how proper initialization can have a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Hadi Daneshmand , Hamed Hassani , Thomas Hofmann

Iteration complexities for optimizing smooth functions with first-order algorithms are typically stated in terms of a global Lipschitz constant of the gradient, and near-optimal results are then achieved using fixed step sizes. But many…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Curtis Fox , Aaron Mishkin , Sharan Vaswani , Mark Schmidt

In this paper, we propose some accelerated methods for solving optimization problems under the condition of relatively smooth and relatively Lipschitz continuous functions with an inexact oracle. We consider the problem of minimizing the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-27 O. S. Savchuk , M. S. Alkousa , A. S. Shushko , A. A. Vyguzov , F. S. Stonyakin , D. A. Pasechnyuk , A. V. Gasnikov