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In this paper, we study smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization problems, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions. We assume access to noisy evaluations of the functions and their gradients,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Saeed Ghadimi , Anthony Nguyen

Bilevel optimization problems, encountered in fields such as economics, engineering, and machine learning, pose significant computational challenges due to their hierarchical structure and constraints at both upper and lower levels.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-21 Mengwei Xu , Yu-Hong Dai , Xin-Wei Liu , Bo Wang

When the available information is noisy zeroth-order (ZO) oracle, stochastic approximation methods are popular for estimating the root of the multivariate gradient equation. Inspired by the Stein's identity, this work establishes a novel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-06 Jingyi Zhu

Stochastic MPECs have found increasing relevance for modeling a broad range of settings in engineering and statistics. Yet, there seem to be no efficient first/zeroth-order schemes equipped with non-asymptotic rate guarantees for resolving…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-23 Shisheng Cui , Uday V. Shanbhag , Farzad Yousefian

Finding effective ways to exploit parallel computing to accelerate Markov chain Monte Carlo methods is an important problem in Bayesian computation and related disciplines. In this paper, we consider the zeroth-order setting where the…

Computation · Statistics 2026-01-28 Francesco Pozza , Giacomo Zanella

In this paper, we propose a class of penalty methods with stochastic approximation for solving stochastic nonlinear programming problems. We assume that only noisy gradients or function values of the objective function are available via…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-20 Xiao Wang , Shiqian Ma , Ya-xiang Yuan

Convex nonsmooth optimization problems, whose solutions live in very high dimensional spaces, have become ubiquitous. To solve them, the class of first-order algorithms known as proximal splitting algorithms is particularly adequate: they…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-27 Laurent Condat , Daichi Kitahara , Andrés Contreras , Akira Hirabayashi

In this paper, we focus on simple bilevel optimization problems, where we minimize a convex smooth objective function over the optimal solution set of another convex smooth constrained optimization problem. We present a novel bilevel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-03 Jincheng Cao , Ruichen Jiang , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani , Aryan Mokhtari

"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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-08-27 Bruce Cox , Anatoli Juditsky , Arkadi Nemirovski

Binary optimization is a powerful tool for modeling combinatorial problems, yet scalable and theoretically sound solution methods remain elusive. Conventional solvers often rely on heuristic strategies with weak guarantees or struggle with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Wenbo Liu , Akang Wang , Dun Ma , Hongyi Jiang , Jianghua Wu , Wenguo Yang

Motivated by emerging applications in machine learning, we consider an optimization problem in a general form where the gradient of the objective function is available through a biased stochastic oracle. We assume a bias-control parameter…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Yin Liu , Sam Davanloo Tajbakhsh

This paper deals with stochastic optimization problems involving Markovian noise with a zero-order oracle. We present and analyze a novel derivative-free method for solving such problems in strongly convex smooth and non-smooth settings…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-06 Boris Prokhorov , Semyon Chebykin , Alexander Gasnikov , Aleksandr Beznosikov

In this paper, we propose a stochastic method for solving equality constrained optimization problems that utilizes predictive variance reduction. Specifically, we develop a method based on the sequential quadratic programming paradigm that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-28 Albert S. Berahas , Jiahao Shi , Zihong Yi , Baoyu Zhou

Bilevel optimization (BLO) problem, where two optimization problems (referred to as upper- and lower-level problems) are coupled hierarchically, has wide applications in areas such as machine learning and operations research. Recently, many…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-19 Xiaotian Jiang , Ioannis Tsaknakis , Prashant Khanduri , Mingyi Hong

In this paper, we propose a multilevel stochastic framework for the solution of nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. The proposed approach uses random regularized first-order models that exploit an available hierarchical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-27 Filippo Marini , Margherita Porcelli , Elisa Riccietti

$\ell_0$ constrained optimization is prevalent in machine learning, particularly for high-dimensional problems, because it is a fundamental approach to achieve sparse learning. Hard-thresholding gradient descent is a dominant technique to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 William de Vazelhes , Hualin Zhang , Huimin Wu , Xiao-Tong Yuan , Bin Gu

Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-03 Yufeng Yang , Erin Tripp , Yifan Sun , Shaofeng Zou , Yi Zhou

Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to…

We study the class of subdifferentially polynomially bounded (SPB) functions, which is a rich class of locally Lipschitz functions that encompasses all Lipschitz functions, all gradient- or Hessian-Lipschitz functions, and even some…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 Ming Lei , Ting Kei Pong , Shuqin Sun , Man-Chung Yue

We introduce a class of stochastic algorithms for minimizing weakly convex functions over proximally smooth sets. As their main building blocks, the algorithms use simplified models of the objective function and the constraint set, along…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-22 Damek Davis , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy , Zhan Shi