Related papers: A Stochastic Objective-Function-Free Adaptive Regu…

Optimization problems with composite functions consist of an objective function which is the sum of a smooth and a (convex) nonsmooth term. This particular structure is exploited by the class of proximal gradient methods and some of their…

In this paper, an inexact proximal-point penalty method is studied for constrained optimization problems, where the objective function is non-convex, and the constraint functions can also be non-convex. The proposed method approximately…

We propose a regularized Hessian-free Newton-type method for minimizing smooth convex functions with Lipschitz continuous Hessians. The algorithm constructs an approximate Hessian by finite differences and selects the regularization…

In this paper, we suggest a new framework for analyzing primal subgradient methods for nonsmooth convex optimization problems. We show that the classical step-size rules, based on normalization of subgradient, or on the knowledge of optimal…

In this paper, we propose a class of penalty methods with stochastic approximation for solving stochastic nonlinear programming problems. We assume that only noisy gradients or function values of the objective function are available via…

Evaluation complexity for convexly constrained optimization is considered and it is shown first that the complexity bound of $O(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ proved by Cartis, Gould and Toint (IMAJNA 32(4) 2012, pp.1662-1695) for computing an…

In many contemporary optimization problems such as those arising in machine learning, it can be computationally challenging or even infeasible to evaluate an entire function or its derivatives. This motivates the use of stochastic…

In this paper we analyze several new methods for solving nonconvex optimization problems with the objective function formed as a sum of two terms: one is nonconvex and smooth, and another is convex but simple and its structure is known.…

In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…

In this paper, we propose second-order sufficient optimality conditions for a very general nonconvex constrained optimization problem, which covers many prominent mathematical programs.Unlike the existing results in the literature, our…

In this paper, we present a novel derivative-free optimization framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Many problems in fields ranging from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning involve settings…

We consider derivative-free algorithms for stochastic and non-stochastic convex optimization problems that use only function values rather than gradients. Focusing on non-asymptotic bounds on convergence rates, we show that if pairs of…

In this paper, we generalize (accelerated) Newton's method with cubic regularization under inexact second-order information for (strongly) convex optimization problems. Under mild assumptions, we provide global rate of convergence of these…

We develop a novel primal-dual algorithm to solve a class of nonsmooth and nonlinear compositional convex minimization problems, which covers many existing and brand-new models as special cases. Our approach relies on a combination of a new…

Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function so that along the iterations the objective function decreases. Such a simple principle allows to solve a large…

We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…

In this paper, we consider both first- and second-order techniques to address continuous optimization problems arising in machine learning. In the first-order case, we propose a framework of transition from deterministic or…

Optimization problems with the objective function in the form of weighted sum and linear equality constraints are considered. Given that the number of local cost functions can be large as well as the number of constraints, a stochastic…

Functional constrained optimization is becoming more and more important in machine learning and operations research. Such problems have potential applications in risk-averse machine learning, semisupervised learning, and robust optimization…

In this paper, we study a class of stochastic bilevel optimization problems, also known as stochastic simple bilevel optimization, where we minimize a smooth stochastic objective function over the optimal solution set of another stochastic…