Related papers: Black-box Optimization Algorithms for Regularized …
In this work, we utilize a Trust Region based Derivative Free Optimization (DFO-TR) method to directly maximize the Area Under Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC), which is a nonsmooth, noisy function. We show that AUC is a smooth…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
In this paper, we develop regularized discrete least squares collocation and finite volume methods for solving two-dimensional nonlinear time-dependent partial differential equations on irregular domains. The solution is approximated using…
Frank-Wolfe methods (FW) have gained significant interest in the machine learning community due to its ability to efficiently solve large problems that admit a sparse structure (e.g. sparse vectors and low-rank matrices). However the…
We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…
A common approach for minimizing a smooth nonlinear function is to employ finite-difference approximations to the gradient. While this can be easily performed when no error is present within the function evaluations, when the function is…
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…
We present an algorithm for minimizing the sum of a strongly convex time-varying function with a time-invariant, convex, and nonsmooth function. The proposed algorithm employs the prediction-correction scheme alongside the forward-backward…
We consider convex optimization with non-smooth objective function and log-concave sampling with non-smooth potential (negative log density). In particular, we study two specific settings where the convex objective/potential function is…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex objective which is the sum of a smooth part, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a nonsmooth part. Inspired by various applications, we focus on the case when the nonsmooth part is a…
In this paper, we propose objective-function-free (OFF) variants of the proximal Newton method for nonconvex composite optimization problems and the regularized Newton method for unconstrained optimization problems, respectively, using…
We consider the problem of finding local minimizers in non-convex and non-smooth optimization. Under the assumption of strict saddle points, positive results have been derived for first-order methods. We present the first known results for…
In this paper, we consider the problem of black box continuous submodular maximization where we only have access to the function values and no information about the derivatives is provided. For a monotone and continuous DR-submodular…
We study first-order methods (FOMs) for solving \emph{composite nonconvex nonsmooth} optimization with linear constraints. Recently, the lower complexity bounds of FOMs on finding an ($\varepsilon,\varepsilon$)-KKT point of the considered…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
This paper presents a lower bound for optimizing a finite sum of $n$ functions, where each function is $L$-smooth and the sum is $\mu$-strongly convex. We show that no algorithm can reach an error $\epsilon$ in minimizing all functions from…
In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of nonsmooth and convex functions. Such problems often arise in typical machine learning problems as empirical risk minimization, but are computationally…
Superlinear convergence has been an elusive goal for black-box nonsmooth optimization. Even in the convex case, the subgradient method is very slow, and while some cutting plane algorithms, including traditional bundle methods, are popular…
We introduce a derivative-free global optimization algorithm that efficiently computes minima for various classes of one-dimensional functions, including non-convex, and non-smooth functions.This algorithm numerically approximates the…
In Part I of this paper, we proposed and analyzed a novel algorithmic framework for the minimization of a nonconvex (smooth) objective function, subject to nonconvex constraints, based on inner convex approximations. This Part II is devoted…