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Optimization problems with rank constraints arise in many applications, including matrix regression, structured PCA, matrix completion and matrix decomposition problems. An attractive heuristic for solving such problems is to factorize the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-09-11 Yudong Chen , Martin J. Wainwright

We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-08-11 Lorenzo Rosasco , Silvia Villa , Bang Công Vũ

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Dongruo Zhou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

We suggest simple implementable modifications of conditional gradient and gradient projection methods for smooth convex optimization problems in Hilbert spaces. Usually, the custom methods attain only weak convergence. We prove strong…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-04 Igor Konnov

We consider the projected gradient algorithm for the nonconvex best subset selection problem that minimizes a given empirical loss function under an $\ell_0$-norm constraint. Through decomposing the feasible set of the given sparsity…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-13 Jan Harold Alcantara , Ching-pei Lee

This paper focuses on convex constrained optimization problems, where the solution is subject to a convex inequality constraint. In particular, we aim at challenging problems for which both projection into the constrained domain and a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-06-13 Tianbao Yang , Qihang Lin , Lijun Zhang

In this paper we consider finite sum composite convex optimization problems with many functional constraints. The objective function is expressed as a finite sum of two terms, one of which admits easy computation of (sub)gradients while the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-03 Nitesh Kumar Singh , Ion Necoara , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev

We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-24 Nuri Mert Vural , Lu Yu , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Stanislav Volgushev , Murat A. Erdogdu

Bilevel optimization problems are receiving increasing attention in machine learning as they provide a natural framework for hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning. A key step to tackle these problems is the efficient computation of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Riccardo Grazzi , Massimiliano Pontil , Saverio Salzo

The paper considers the problem of network-based computation of global minima in smooth nonconvex optimization problems. It is known that distributed gradient-descent-type algorithms can achieve convergence to the set of global minima by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-24 Brian Swenson , Anirudh Sridhar , H. Vincent Poor

A stochastic gradient method for finite-sum minimization subject to deterministic linear constraints is proposed and analyzed. The procedure presented adapts the projected gradient method on convex set to the use of both a stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Natasa Krklec Jerinkic , Benedetta Morini , Mahsa Yousefi

We consider joint optimization and learning problems arising in real-time decision systems. While most existing work focuses primarily on convex, revenue-based objectives, we extend this line of research to multi-objective formulations. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Zijun Li , Aswin Kannan

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

In this paper, we introduce an unbiased gradient simulation algorithms for solving convex optimization problem with stochastic function compositions. We show that the unbiased gradient generated from the algorithm has finite variance and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-22 Jose Blanchet , Donald Goldfarb , Garud Iyengar , Fengpei Li , Chaoxu Zhou

Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2017-12-12 Yang Yang , Gesualdo Scutari , Daniel P. Palomar , Marius Pesavento

Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-17 Mengdi Wang , Ethan X. Fang , Han Liu

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

In existing distributed stochastic optimization studies, it is usually assumed that the gradient noise has a bounded variance. However, recent research shows that the heavy-tailed noise, which allows an unbounded variance, is closer to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-15 Jun Hu , Chao Sun , Bo Chen , Jianzheng Wang , Zheming Wang

In this paper, we study when we might expect the optimization curve induced by gradient descent to be \emph{convex} -- precluding, for example, an initial plateau followed by a sharp decrease, making it difficult to decide when optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Guy Barzilai , Ohad Shamir , Moslem Zamani

The performance of optimization methods is often tied to the spectrum of the objective Hessian. Yet, conventional assumptions, such as smoothness, do often not enable us to make finely-grained convergence statements -- particularly not for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-08 Nikita Doikov , Sebastian U. Stich , Martin Jaggi