Related papers: Avoiding strict saddle points of nonconvex regular…
Recently, saddle point problems have received much attention due to their powerful modeling capability for a lot of problems from diverse domains. Applications of these problems occur in many applied areas, such as robust optimization,…
In this paper we present an inexact zeroth-order method suitable for the solution nonsmooth and nonconvex stochastic composite optimization problems, in which the objective is split into a real-valued Lipschitz continuous stochastic…
We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of first-order methods for escaping strict saddle points in smooth non-convex optimization. Our main contribution is a Perturbed Saddle-escape Descent (PSD) algorithm with fully explicit…
Machine learning problems such as neural network training, tensor decomposition, and matrix factorization, require local minimization of a nonconvex function. This local minimization is challenged by the presence of saddle points, of which…
We introduce a geometrically transparent strict saddle property for nonsmooth functions. This property guarantees that simple proximal algorithms on weakly convex problems converge only to local minimizers, when randomly initialized. We…
"Classical" First Order (FO) algorithms of convex optimization, such as Mirror Descent algorithm or Nesterov's optimal algorithm of smooth convex optimization, are well known to have optimal (theoretical) complexity estimates which do not…
Low-complexity non-smooth convex regularizers are routinely used to impose some structure (such as sparsity or low-rank) on the coefficients for linear predictors in supervised learning. Model consistency consists then in selecting the…
We propose a new randomized algorithm for solving convex optimization problems that have a large number of constraints (with high probability). Existing methods like interior-point or Newton-type algorithms are hard to apply to such…
Motivated by TRACE algorithm [Curtis et al. 2017], we propose a trust region algorithm for finding second order stationary points of a linearly constrained non-convex optimization problem. We show the convergence of the proposed algorithm…
The optimization problem with sparsity arises in many areas of science and engineering such as compressed sensing, image processing, statistical learning and data sparse approximation. In this paper, we study the dual-density-based…
In this paper, we design an inertial accelerated primal-dual algorithm to address the convex-concave saddle point problem, which is formulated as $\min_{x}\max_{y} f(x) + \langle Kx, y \rangle - g(y)$. Remarkably, both functions $f$ and $g$…
This paper is devoted to the study of tilt stability of local minimizers, which plays an important role in both theoretical and numerical aspects of optimization. This notion has been comprehensively investigated in the unconstrained…
We propose perturbed proximal algorithms that can provably escape strict saddles for nonsmooth weakly convex functions. The main results are based on a novel characterization of $\epsilon$-approximate local minimum for nonsmooth functions,…
Optimization algorithms are unlikely to converge to strict saddle points. Proofs to that effect rely on the Center-Stable Manifold Theorem (CSMT), casting algorithms as dynamical systems: $x_{k+1} = g_k(x_k)$. In its standard form, the CSMT…
We study unconstrained optimization problems of nonsmooth, nonconvex Lipschitz functions, using only noisy pairwise comparisons governed by a known link function. Our goal is to compute a $(\delta,\varepsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point.…
In this note, we focus on smooth nonconvex optimization problems that obey: (1) all local minimizers are also global; and (2) around any saddle point or local maximizer, the objective has a negative directional curvature. Concrete…
Motivated, in particular, by the entropy-regularized optimal transport problem, we consider convex optimization problems with linear equality constraints, where the dual objective has Lipschitz $p$-th order derivatives, and develop two…
Classical primal-dual algorithms attempt to solve $\max_{\mu}\min_{x} \mathcal{L}(x,\mu)$ by alternatively minimizing over the primal variable $x$ through primal descent and maximizing the dual variable $\mu$ through dual ascent. However,…
We develop a line-search second-order algorithmic framework for minimizing finite sums. We do not make any convexity assumptions, but require the terms of the sum to be continuously differentiable and have Lipschitz-continuous gradients.…
In this work, we consider the distributed optimization of non-smooth convex functions using a network of computing units. We investigate this problem under two regularity assumptions: (1) the Lipschitz continuity of the global objective…