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Incremental gradient and incremental proximal methods are a fundamental class of optimization algorithms used for solving finite sum problems, broadly studied in the literature. Yet, without strong convexity, their convergence guarantees…

Despite the recent growth of theoretical studies and empirical successes of neural networks, gradient backpropagation is still the most widely used algorithm for training such networks. On the one hand, we have deterministic or full…

Proximal gradient algorithms (PGA), while foundational for inverse problems like image reconstruction, often yield unstable convergence and suboptimal solutions by violating the critical non-negativity constraint. We identify the gradient…

We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…

We present new algorithms for online convex optimization over unbounded domains that obtain parameter-free regret in high-probability given access only to potentially heavy-tailed subgradient estimates. Previous work in unbounded domains…

Stochastic variance-reduced algorithms such as Stochastic Average Gradient (SAG) and SAGA, and their deterministic counterparts like the Incremental Aggregated Gradient (IAG) method, have been extensively studied in large-scale machine…

We consider smooth stochastic convex optimization problems in the context of algorithms which are based on directional derivatives of the objective function. This context can be considered as an intermediate one between derivative-free…

We study finite-sum non-convex optimization $\min_{x\in\mathbb{R}^d} F(x) \;=\; \frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^n f_i(x)$ and analyze a variance-reduced cubic Newton method based on EMA-smoothed SARAH estimators for both gradient and Hessian…

Gradient-based solvers risk convergence to local optima, leading to incorrect researcher inference. Heuristic-based algorithms are able to ``break free" of these local optima to eventually converge to the true global optimum. However, given…

For solving large-scale non-convex problems, we propose inexact variants of trust region and adaptive cubic regularization methods, which, to increase efficiency, incorporate various approximations. In particular, in addition to approximate…

Stochastic smooth nonconvex minimax problems are prevalent in machine learning, e.g., GAN training, fair classification, and distributionally robust learning. Stochastic gradient descent ascent (GDA)-type methods are popular in practice due…

In this paper, we first introduce a preconditioned primal-dual gradient algorithm based on conjugate duality theory. This algorithm is designed to solve composite optimization problem whose objective function consists of two summands: a…

We consider the problem of computing a positive definite $p \times p$ inverse covariance matrix aka precision matrix $\theta=(\theta_{ij})$ which optimizes a regularized Gaussian maximum likelihood problem, with the elastic-net regularizer…

In this paper, we analyze the finite sample complexity of stochastic system identification using modern tools from machine learning and statistics. An unknown discrete-time linear system evolves over time under Gaussian noise without…

We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…

Stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints have a broad range of applications in intelligent transportation, cyber-security, and smart grids. In this paper, first, we propose an inexact-proximal accelerated…

We propose a sampling algorithm that achieves superior complexity bounds in all the classical settings (strongly log-concave, log-concave, Logarithmic-Sobolev inequality (LSI), Poincar\'e inequality) as well as more general settings with…

We develop a new efficient sequential approximate leverage score algorithm, SALSA, using methods from randomized numerical linear algebra (RandNLA) for large matrices. We demonstrate that, with high probability, the accuracy of SALSA's…

We consider a smoothed online convex optimization (SOCO) problem with predictions, where the learner has access to a finite lookahead window of time-varying stage costs, but suffers a switching cost for changing its actions at each stage.…

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…