Related papers: Robust Second-Order Nonconvex Optimization and Its…
Policy gradient (PG) is widely used in reinforcement learning due to its scalability and good performance. In recent years, several variance-reduced PG methods have been proposed with a theoretical guarantee of converging to an approximate…
Optimizing non-convex functions is of primary importance in the vast majority of machine learning algorithms. Even though many gradient descent based algorithms have been studied, successive convex approximation based algorithms have been…
The worst-case robust adaptive beamforming problem for general-rank signal model is considered. Its formulation is to maximize the worst-case signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), incorporating a positive semidefinite constraint…
Constrained second-order convex optimization algorithms are the method of choice when a high accuracy solution to a problem is needed, due to their local quadratic convergence. These algorithms require the solution of a constrained…
We present a novel, practical, and provable approach for solving diagonally constrained semi-definite programming (SDP) problems at scale using accelerated non-convex programming. Our algorithm non-trivially combines acceleration motions…
There is a gap between finding a first-order stationary point (FOSP) and a second-order stationary point (SOSP) under differential privacy constraints, and it remains unclear whether privately finding an SOSP is more challenging than…
This paper considers the problem of recovery of a low-rank matrix in the situation when most of its entries are not observed and a fraction of observed entries are corrupted. The observations are noisy realizations of the sum of a low rank…
We revisit the classical problem of finding an approximately stationary point of the average of $n$ smooth and possibly nonconvex functions. The optimal complexity of stochastic first-order methods in terms of the number of gradient…
Recently, Musco and Woodruff (FOCS, 2017) showed that given an $n \times n$ positive semidefinite (PSD) matrix $A$, it is possible to compute a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate relative-error low-rank approximation to $A$ by querying…
In this paper, we propose a successive pseudo-convex approximation algorithm to efficiently compute stationary points for a large class of possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The stationary points are obtained by solving a sequence of…
In this paper we consider finding a second-order stationary point (SOSP) of nonconvex equality constrained optimization when a nearly feasible point is known. In particular, we first propose a new Newton-CG method for finding an approximate…
Low-rank modeling has a lot of important applications in machine learning, computer vision and social network analysis. While the matrix rank is often approximated by the convex nuclear norm, the use of nonconvex low-rank regularizers has…
We consider the problem of Robust PCA in the fully and partially observed settings. Without corruptions, this is the well-known matrix completion problem. From a statistical standpoint this problem has been recently well-studied, and…
Finding approximate stationary points, i.e., points where the gradient is approximately zero, of non-convex but smooth objective functions $f$ over unrestricted $d$-dimensional domains is one of the most fundamental problems in classical…
We explore why many recently proposed robust estimation problems are efficiently solvable, even though the underlying optimization problems are non-convex. We study the loss landscape of these robust estimation problems, and identify the…
Low-rank modeling has many important applications in computer vision and machine learning. While the matrix rank is often approximated by the convex nuclear norm, the use of nonconvex low-rank regularizers has demonstrated better empirical…
In this paper, we focus on a matrix factorization-based approach to recover low-rank {\it asymmetric} matrices from corrupted measurements. We propose an {\it Overparameterized Preconditioned Subgradient Algorithm (OPSA)} and provide, for…
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…
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.…
Verifying the Second-Order Sufficient Condition (SOSC), thus ensuring a stationary point locally minimizes a given objective function (subject to certain constraints), is an essential component of non-convex computational optimization and…