Related papers: Online Optimization Perspective on First-Order and…
We consider Online Convex Optimization (OCO) in the setting where the costs are $m$-strongly convex and the online learner pays a switching cost for changing decisions between rounds. We show that the recently proposed Online Balanced…
Existing decentralized algorithms usually require knowledge of problem parameters for updating local iterates. For example, the hyperparameters (such as learning rate) usually require the knowledge of Lipschitz constant of the global…
We study stochastic optimization algorithms for constrained nonconvex stochastic optimization problems with Markovian data. In particular, we focus on the case when the transition kernel of the Markov chain is state-dependent. Such…
This paper investigates the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by the summation of $n$ local cost functions. We solve such a problem by involving zeroth-order (ZO) information…
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…
This paper considers the problem of online optimization where the objective function is time-varying. In particular, we extend coordinate descent type algorithms to the online case, where the objective function varies after a finite number…
In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the sum of nonconvex and possibly nonsmooth functions over a connected multi-agent network, where the agents have partial knowledge about the global cost function and can only access the…
We introduce a class of first-order methods for smooth constrained optimization that are based on an analogy to non-smooth dynamical systems. Two distinctive features of our approach are that (i) projections or optimizations over the entire…
This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…
In this two-part paper, we propose a general algorithmic framework for the minimization of a nonconvex smooth function subject to nonconvex smooth constraints. The algorithm solves a sequence of (separable) strongly convex problems and…
Privacy protection and nonconvexity are two challenging problems in decentralized optimization and learning involving sensitive data. Despite some recent advances addressing each of the two problems separately, no results have been reported…
Bilevel optimization has been successfully applied to many important machine learning problems. Algorithms for solving bilevel optimization have been studied under various settings. In this paper, we study the nonconvex-strongly-convex…
Motivated by machine learning applications in networks of sensors, internet-of-things (IoT) devices, and autonomous agents, we propose techniques for distributed stochastic convex learning from high-rate data streams. The setup involves a…
We consider the minimization of submodular functions subject to ordering constraints. We show that this optimization problem can be cast as a convex optimization problem on a space of uni-dimensional measures, with ordering constraints…
In this paper, we consider multi-stage stochastic optimization problems with convex objectives and conic constraints at each stage. We present a new stochastic first-order method, namely the dynamic stochastic approximation (DSA) algorithm,…
Mini-batch optimization has proven to be a powerful paradigm for large-scale learning. However, the state of the art parallel mini-batch algorithms assume synchronous operation or cyclic update orders. When worker nodes are heterogeneous…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a powerful framework for training robust models against data distribution shifts. This paper focuses on constrained DRO, which has an explicit characterization of the robustness level. Existing…
Difference of convex (DC) functions cover a broad family of non-convex and possibly non-smooth and non-differentiable functions, and have wide applications in machine learning and statistics. Although deterministic algorithms for DC…
In modern decentralized applications, ensuring communication efficiency and privacy for the users are the key challenges. In order to train machine-learning models, the algorithm has to communicate to the data center and sample data for its…
We analyze stochastic gradient descent for optimizing non-convex functions. In many cases for non-convex functions the goal is to find a reasonable local minimum, and the main concern is that gradient updates are trapped in saddle points.…