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The Muon optimizer has recently demonstrated remarkable empirical success in training large language models. However, the theoretical understanding of its mechanisms remains limited. Current convergence guarantees for Muon rely heavily on…
We study the problem of computing deterministic optimal policies for constrained Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state and action spaces, which are widely encountered in constrained dynamical systems. Designing…
Coordinate-type subgradient methods for addressing nonsmooth optimization problems are relatively underexplored due to the set-valued nature of the subdifferential. In this work, our study focuses on nonsmooth composite optimization…
Classical analysis of convex and non-convex optimization methods often requires the Lipshitzness of the gradient, which limits the analysis to functions bounded by quadratics. Recent work relaxed this requirement to a non-uniform smoothness…
The use of derivative-based solvers to compute solutions to optimal control problems with non-differentiable cost or dynamics often requires reformulations or relaxations that complicate the implementation or increase computational…
This paper proposes and develops new Newton-type methods to solve structured nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems with justifying their fast local and global convergence by means of advanced tools of variational analysis and…
Generalized and Simulated Method of Moments are often used to estimate structural Economic models. Yet, it is commonly reported that optimization is challenging because the corresponding objective function is non-convex. For smooth…
In this paper, we focus on providing convergence guarantees for stochastic subgradient methods in minimizing nonsmooth nonconvex functions. We first investigate the global stability of a general framework for stochastic subgradient methods,…
We propose a projection-free conditional gradient-type algorithm for smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions and the constraint set is a closed convex…
The paper proposes and justifies a new algorithm of the proximal Newton type to solve a broad class of nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems without strong convexity assumptions. Based on advanced notions and techniques of…
This work explores the global optimization problem of finding lowest-energy configurations (ground states) in disordered continuous spins models from statistical physics, with a particular focus on the random field XY model. Due to an…
An algorithm is proposed for solving optimization problems with stochastic objective and deterministic equality and inequality constraints. This algorithm is objective-function-free in the sense that it only uses the objective's gradient…
We focus on analyzing the classical stochastic projected gradient methods under a general dependent data sampling scheme for constrained smooth nonconvex optimization. We show the worst-case rate of convergence $\tilde{O}(t^{-1/4})$ and…
Stochastic composition optimization draws much attention recently and has been successful in many emerging applications of machine learning, statistical analysis, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we focus on the composition…
This paper proposes a universal algorithm for convex minimization problems of the composite form $g_0(x)+h(g_1(x),\dots, g_m(x)) + u(x)$. We allow each $g_j$ to independently range from being nonsmooth Lipschitz to smooth, from convex to…
In this paper, we suggest a new framework for analyzing primal subgradient methods for nonsmooth convex optimization problems. We show that the classical step-size rules, based on normalization of subgradient, or on the knowledge of optimal…
State-space smoothing has found many applications in science and engineering. Under linear and Gaussian assumptions, smoothed estimates can be obtained using efficient recursions, for example Rauch-Tung-Striebel and Mayne-Fraser algorithms.…
Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…
We study unconstrained optimization problems with nonsmooth and convex objective function in the form of a mathematical expectation. The proposed method approximates the expected objective function with a sample average function using…
Model-based reinforcement learning approaches carry the promise of being data efficient. However, due to challenges in learning dynamics models that sufficiently match the real-world dynamics, they struggle to achieve the same asymptotic…