Related papers: A simple and improved algorithm for noisy, convex,…
This work studies minimization problems with zero-order noisy oracle information under the assumption that the objective function is highly smooth and possibly satisfies additional properties. We consider two kinds of zero-order projected…
This paper presents a framework to solve constrained optimization problems in an accelerated manner based on High-Order Tuners (HT). Our approach is based on reformulating the original constrained problem as the unconstrained optimization…
We study a fixed step-size noisy distributed gradient descent algorithm for solving optimization problems in which the objective is a finite sum of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Random perturbations are introduced to the…
We focus on the problem of minimizing a convex function $f$ over a convex set $S$ given $T$ queries to a stochastic first order oracle. We argue that the complexity of convex minimization is only determined by the rate of growth of the…
Successive quadratic approximations, or second-order proximal methods, are useful for minimizing functions that are a sum of a smooth part and a convex, possibly nonsmooth part that promotes regularization. Most analyses of iteration…
Optimization over low rank matrices has broad applications in machine learning. For large scale problems, an attractive heuristic is to factorize the low rank matrix to a product of two much smaller matrices. In this paper, we study the…
Most existing distance metric learning methods assume perfect side information that is usually given in pairwise or triplet constraints. Instead, in many real-world applications, the constraints are derived from side information, such as…
Motivated by the need for efficient estimation of conditional expectations, we consider a least-squares function approximation problem with heavily polluted data. Existing methods that are effective in the small-noise regime are suboptimal…
We study the problem of estimating low-rank matrices from linear measurements (a.k.a., matrix sensing) through nonconvex optimization. We propose an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve a nonconvex…
We extend the standard notion of self-concordance to non-convex optimization and develop a family of second-order algorithms with global convergence guarantees. In particular, two function classes -- \textit{weakly self-concordant}…
The proximal point algorithm is a widely used tool for solving a variety of convex optimization problems such as finding zeros of maximally monotone operators, fixed points of nonexpansive mappings, as well as minimizing convex functions.…
This paper studies noisy low-rank matrix completion: given partial and noisy entries of a large low-rank matrix, the goal is to estimate the underlying matrix faithfully and efficiently. Arguably one of the most popular paradigms to tackle…
This paper focuses on the minimization of a sum of a twice continuously differentiable function $f$ and a nonsmooth convex function. An inexact regularized proximal Newton method is proposed by an approximation to the Hessian of $f$…
Constrained optimization problems where both the objective and constraints may be nonsmooth and nonconvex arise across many learning and data science settings. In this paper, we show for any Lipschitz, weakly convex objectives and…
Gradient-free/zeroth-order methods for black-box convex optimization have been extensively studied in the last decade with the main focus on oracle calls complexity. In this paper, besides the oracle complexity, we focus also on iteration…
We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex objective function using an iterative algorithm based on Newton's method and the linear conjugate gradient algorithm, with explicit detection and use of negative curvature directions for the…
The network localization problem with convex and non-convex distance constraints may be modeled as a nonlinear optimization problem. The existing localization techniques are mainly based on convex optimization. In those techniques, the…
In this paper, we provide near-optimal accelerated first-order methods for minimizing a broad class of smooth nonconvex functions that are strictly unimodal on all lines through a minimizer. This function class, which we call the class of…
We consider the case of derivative-free algorithms for non-convex optimization, also known as zero order algorithms, that use only function evaluations rather than gradients. For a wide variety of gradient approximators based on finite…
This paper optimizes the step coefficients of first-order methods for smooth convex minimization in terms of the worst-case convergence bound (i.e., efficiency) of the decrease in the gradient norm. This work is based on the performance…