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This work considers the problem of finding a first-order stationary point of a non-convex function with potentially unbounded smoothness constant using a stochastic gradient oracle. We focus on the class of $(L_0,L_1)$-smooth functions…
This paper concerns quasi-stochastic approximation (QSA) to solve root finding problems commonly found in applications to optimization and reinforcement learning. The general constant gain algorithm may be expressed as the…
Averaging scheme has attracted extensive attention in deep learning as well as traditional machine learning. It achieves theoretically optimal convergence and also improves the empirical model performance. However, there is still a lack of…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…
Nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization has gained widespread interest over the last decade. However, most existing works focus on variants of gradient descent-ascent (GDA) algorithms, which are only applicable to smooth nonconvex-concave…
Variational inequalities have recently attracted considerable interest in machine learning as a flexible paradigm for models that go beyond ordinary loss function minimization (such as generative adversarial networks and related deep…
Classical convergence analyses for optimization algorithms rely on the widely-adopted uniform smoothness assumption. However, recent experimental studies have demonstrated that many machine learning problems exhibit non-uniform smoothness,…
Aligning large language models (LLMs) to desirable human values requires balancing multiple, potentially conflicting objectives such as helpfulness, truthfulness, and harmlessness, which presents a multi-objective optimisation challenge.…
We propose an Adagrad-like algorithm for multi-objective unconstrained optimization that relies on the computation of a common descent direction only. Unlike classical local algorithms for multi-objective optimization, our approach does not…
In this work, we develop analysis and algorithms for a class of (stochastic) bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level (LL) problem is strongly convex and linearly constrained. Most existing approaches for solving such problems rely…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
Epoch gradient descent method (a.k.a. Epoch-GD) proposed by Hazan and Kale (2011) was deemed a breakthrough for stochastic strongly convex minimization, which achieves the optimal convergence rate of $O(1/T)$ with $T$ iterative updates for…
In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…
In this work, we study the problem of finding Pareto optimal policies in multi-agent reinforcement learning problems with cooperative reward structures. We show that any algorithm where each agent only optimizes their reward is subject to…
While momentum-based methods, in conjunction with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work,…
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…
Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence…
In this paper, we examine the convergence of mirror descent in a class of stochastic optimization problems that are not necessarily convex (or even quasi-convex), and which we call variationally coherent. Since the standard technique of…
The development of artificial intelligence (AI) for science has led to the emergence of learning-based research paradigms, necessitating a compelling reevaluation of the design of multi-objective optimization (MOO) methods. The new…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…