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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely adopted iterative method for optimizing differentiable objective functions. In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach to scale up SGD in applications involving non-convex functions…
Although artificial neural networks have shown great promise in applications including computer vision and speech recognition, there remains considerable practical and theoretical difficulty in optimizing their parameters. The seemingly…
Privacy protection and nonconvexity are two challenging problems in decentralized optimization and learning involving sensitive data. Despite some recent advances addressing each of the two problems separately, no results have been reported…
In this paper we analyze several new methods for solving nonconvex optimization problems with the objective function formed as a sum of two terms: one is nonconvex and smooth, and another is convex but simple and its structure is known.…
Quadratic constrained quadratic programming problems often occur in various fields such as engineering practice, management science, and network communication. This article mainly studies a non convex quadratic programming problem with…
Differentially private (stochastic) gradient descent is the workhorse of DP private machine learning in both the convex and non-convex settings. Without privacy constraints, second-order methods, like Newton's method, converge faster than…
We present a novel layerwise optimization algorithm for the learning objective of Piecewise-Linear Convolutional Neural Networks (PL-CNNs), a large class of convolutional neural networks. Specifically, PL-CNNs employ piecewise linear…
Deep neural networks have recently achieved state of the art performance thanks to new training algorithms for rapid parameter estimation and new regularization methods to reduce overfitting. However, in practice the network architecture…
This paper proposes a new family of algorithms for training neural networks (NNs). These are based on recent developments in the field of non-convex optimization, going under the general name of successive convex approximation (SCA)…
We study distributed composite optimization over networks: agents minimize a sum of smooth (strongly) convex functions, the agents' sum-utility, plus a nonsmooth (extended-valued) convex one. We propose a general unified algorithmic…
In this paper we propose a distributed version of a randomized block-coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of a partially separable smooth convex function and a fully separable non-smooth convex function. Under the assumption of…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved significant success in a variety of real world applications, i.e., image classification. However, tons of parameters in the networks restrict the efficiency of neural networks due to the large model…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
A generalized conditional gradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of them differentiable, is presented. This iterative method relies on two main ingredients: First, the minimization of a partially linearized…
Sparse optimization refers to an optimization problem involving the zero-norm in objective or constraints. In this paper, nonconvex approximation approaches for sparse optimization have been studied with a unifying point of view in DC…
In this paper, we consider reinforcement learning of nonlinear systems with continuous state and action spaces. We present an episodic learning algorithm, where we for each episode use convex optimization to find a two-layer neural network…
In decision-making problems under uncertainty, predicting unknown parameters is often considered independent of the optimization part. Decision-focused learning (DFL) is a task-oriented framework that integrates prediction and optimization…
Recent DNN pruning algorithms have succeeded in reducing the number of parameters in fully connected layers, often with little or no drop in classification accuracy. However, most of the existing pruning schemes either have to be applied…
In this paper, we study a class of nonconvex and nonsmooth structured difference-of-convex (DC) programs, which contain in the convex part the sum of a nonsmooth linearly composed convex function and a differentiable function, and in the…
We study the continuous-time structure of the difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA) for smooth DC decompositions with a strongly convex component. In dual coordinates, classical DCA is exactly the full-step explicit Euler discretization of a…