English
Related papers

Related papers: Proximal Oracles for Optimization and Sampling

200 papers

We propose a novel stochastic smoothing accelerated gradient (SSAG) method for general constrained nonsmooth convex composite optimization, and analyze the convergence rates. The SSAG method allows various smoothing techniques, and can deal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Ruyu Wang , Chao Zhang

Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-14 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He , Guanghui Lan , Florian Wolf

This paper develops an adaptive proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving linearly constrained, composite optimization problems under the assumption that the smooth component of the objective is weakly convex,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-04 Leandro Farias Maia , David H. Gutman , Renato D. C. Monteiro , Gilson N. Silva

In this paper, we combine the positive aspects of the Gradient Sampling (GS) and bundle methods, as the most efficient methods in nonsmooth optimization, to develop a robust method for solving unconstrained nonsmooth convex optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-26 M. Maleknia , M. Shamsi

Composite minimization involves a collection of smooth functions which are aggregated in a nonsmooth manner. In the convex setting, we design an algorithm by linearizing each smooth component in accordance with its main curvature. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-26 Jérôme Bolte , Zheng Chen , Edouard Pauwels

We propose a proximal variable smoothing algorithm for a nonsmooth optimization problem whose cost function is the sum of three functions including a weakly convex composite function. The proposed algorithm has a single-loop structure…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-09 Keita Kume , Isao Yamada

In this paper, we discuss the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: a smooth function plus a non-smooth function. Further, the smooth part can be expressed by the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-17 Luo Luo , Zihao Chen , Zhihua Zhang , Wu-Jun Li

We consider the problem of sampling from a density of the form $p(x) \propto \exp(-f(x)- g(x))$, where $f: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is a smooth and strongly convex function and $g: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-02 Wenlong Mou , Nicolas Flammarion , Martin J. Wainwright , Peter L. Bartlett

Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-01-19 Bo Jiang , Tianyi Lin , Shiqian Ma , Shuzhong Zhang

We propose a new proximal, path-following framework for a class of constrained convex problems. We consider settings where the nonlinear---and possibly non-smooth---objective part is endowed with a proximity operator, and the constraint set…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-12-28 Quoc Tran-Dinh , Anastasios Kyrillidis , Volkan Cevher

In this paper, we consider a broad class of nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems, where one objective component is a nonsmooth weakly convex function composed with a linear operator. By integrating variable smoothing techniques…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-03 Xian-Jun Long , Kang Zeng , Gao-Xi Li , Minh N. Dao , Zai-Yun Peng

Composite convex optimization problems which include both a nonsmooth term and a low-rank promoting term have important applications in machine learning and signal processing, such as when one wishes to recover an unknown matrix that is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-28 Dan Garber , Atara Kaplan

The breakthrough ideas in the modern proximal splitting methodologies allow us to express the set of all minimizers of a superposition of multiple nonsmooth convex functions as the fixed point set of computable nonexpansive operators. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-01 Isao Yamada , Masao Yamagishi

In this note we propose a new variant of the hybrid variance-reduced proximal gradient method in [7] to solve a common stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problem under standard assumptions. We simply replace the independent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-21 Deyi Liu , Lam M. Nguyen , Quoc Tran-Dinh

We develop model-based methods for solving stochastic convex optimization problems, introducing the approximate-proximal point, or aProx, family, which includes stochastic subgradient, proximal point, and bundle methods. When the modeling…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-20 Hilal Asi , John C. Duchi

An optimization algorithm for nonsmooth nonconvex constrained optimization problems with upper-C2 objective functions is proposed and analyzed. Upper-C2 is a weakly concave property that exists in difference of convex (DC) functions and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-21 Jingyi Wang , Cosmin G. Petra

Operator splitting algorithms are a cornerstone of modern first-order optimization, relying critically on proximal operators as their fundamental building blocks. However, explicit formulas for proximal operators are available only for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-17 Nicholas Di , Eric C. Chi , Samy Wu Fung

In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-12 Andre Milzarek , Xiantao Xiao , Shicong Cen , Zaiwen Wen , Michael Ulbrich

We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-15 Vladislav Tominin , Yaroslav Tominin , Ekaterina Borodich , Dmitry Kovalev , Alexander Gasnikov , Pavel Dvurechensky

In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-21 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias