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This paper addresses the problem of optimizing partition functions in a stochastic learning setting. We propose a stochastic variant of the bound majorization algorithm that relies on upper-bounding the partition function with a quadratic…
Randomized smoothing is a widely adopted technique for optimizing nonsmooth objective functions. However, its efficiency analysis typically relies on global Lipschitz continuity, a condition rarely met in practical applications. To address…
This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
Classical results show that gradient descent converges linearly to minimizers of smooth strongly convex functions. A natural question is whether there exists a locally nearly linearly convergent method for nonsmooth functions with quadratic…
Recent work has shown the surprising power of low-degree sandwiching polynomial approximators in the context of challenging learning settings such as learning with distribution shift, testable learning, and learning with contamination. A…
This work analyzes the convergence of a class of smoothing-based gradient descent methods when applied to optimization problems. In particular, Gaussian smoothing is employed to define a nonlocal gradient that reduces high-frequency noise,…
We propose an adaptive zeroth-order method for minimizing differentiable functions with $L$-Lipschitz continuous gradients. The method is designed to take advantage of the eventual compressibility of the gradient of the objective function,…
In this paper, we study and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for solving bilvel problems, when neither the upper/lower objective values, nor their unbiased gradient estimates are available. In particular, exploiting…
We prove the first convergence guarantees for a subgradient method minimizing a generic Lipschitz function over generic Lipschitz inequality constraints. No smoothness or convexity (or weak convexity) assumptions are made. Instead, we…
We propose a single time-scale stochastic subgradient method for constrained optimization of a composition of several nonsmooth and nonconvex functions. The functions are assumed to be locally Lipschitz and differentiable in a generalized…
Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…
This work considers the question: what convergence guarantees does the stochastic subgradient method have in the absence of smoothness and convexity? We prove that the stochastic subgradient method, on any semialgebraic locally Lipschitz…
We study unconstrained optimization problems of nonsmooth, nonconvex Lipschitz functions, using only noisy pairwise comparisons governed by a known link function. Our goal is to compute a $(\delta,\varepsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point.…
We consider the minimisation problem of submodular functions and investigate the application of a zeroth-order method to this problem. The method is based on exploiting a Gaussian smoothing random oracle to estimate the smoothed function…
We investigate stochastic Bregman proximal gradient (SBPG) methods for minimizing a finite-sum nonconvex function $\Psi(x):=\frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^nf_i(x)+\phi(x)$, where $\phi$ is convex and nonsmooth, while $f_i$, instead of gradient…
Randomized zeroth-order methods are classically analyzed in expectation, but a black-box Markov conversion can give misleading high-probability guarantees, in particular by forcing the finite-difference smoothing radius to shrink with the…
We give improved pseudorandom generators (PRGs) for Lipschitz functions of low-degree polynomials over the hypercube. These are functions of the form psi(P(x)), where P is a low-degree polynomial and psi is a function with small Lipschitz…
Stochastic gradient methods for minimizing nonconvex composite objective functions typically rely on the Lipschitz smoothness of the differentiable part, but this assumption fails in many important problem classes like quadratic inverse…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…