Related papers: A Two Stepsize SQP Method for Nonlinear Equality C…
In this paper, we propose a class of super-schemes for efficiently solving nonlinear unconstrained optimization problems. The proposed approach introduces two novel choices of step-size parameters, leading to efficient descent directions…
In this work, we propose new adaptive step size strategies that improve several stochastic gradient methods. Our first method (StoPS) is based on the classical Polyak step size (Polyak, 1987) and is an extension of the recent development of…
Q-learning is a stochastic approximation version of the classic value iteration. The literature has established that Q-learning suffers from both maximization bias and slower convergence. Recently, multi-step algorithms have shown practical…
We present a different view on stochastic optimization, which goes back to the splitting schemes for approximate solutions of ODE. In this work, we provide a connection between stochastic gradient descent approach and first-order splitting…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…
Semi-supervised learning is pervasive in real-world applications, where only a few labeled data are available and large amounts of instances remain unlabeled. Since AUC is an important model evaluation metric in classification, directly…
We introduce BayeSQP, a novel algorithm for general black-box optimization that merges the structure of sequential quadratic programming with concepts from Bayesian optimization. BayeSQP employs second-order Gaussian process surrogates for…
In this paper, we study the sequential convex programming method with monotone line search (SCP$_{ls}$) in [46] for a class of difference-of-convex (DC) optimization problems with multiple smooth inequality constraints. The SCP$_{ls}$ is a…
We develop an implementable stochastic proximal point (SPP) method for a class of weakly convex, composite optimization problems. The proposed stochastic proximal point algorithm incorporates a variance reduction mechanism and the resulting…
The Standard Quadratic optimization Problem (StQP), arguably the simplest among all classes of NP-hard optimization problems, consists of extremizing a quadratic form (the simplest nonlinear polynomial) over the standard simplex (the…
We propose a stochastic conditional gradient method (CGM) for minimizing convex finite-sum objectives formed as a sum of smooth and non-smooth terms. Existing CGM variants for this template either suffer from slow convergence rates, or…
Indirect trajectory optimization methods such as Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) have found considerable success when only planning under dynamic feasibility constraints. Meanwhile, nonlinear programming (NLP) has been the…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the many iterative optimization methods that are widely used in solving machine learning problems. These methods display valuable properties and attract researchers and industrial machine learning…
This work proposes a framework, embedded within the Performance Estimation framework (PEP), for obtaining worst-case performance guarantees on stochastic first-order methods. Given a first-order method, a function class, and a noise model…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
A novel gradient stepsize is derived at the motivation of equipping the Barzilai-Borwein (BB) method with two dimensional quadratic termination property. A remarkable feature of the novel stepsize is that its computation only depends on the…
Many stochastic optimization algorithms work by estimating the gradient of the cost function on the fly by sampling datapoints uniformly at random from a training set. However, the estimator might have a large variance, which inadvertently…
Optimization problems involving sequential decisions in a stochastic environment were studied in Stochastic Programming (SP), Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In this paper we mainly concentrate on SP…
We present a convergence rate analysis for biased stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where individual gradient updates are corrupted by computation errors. We develop stochastic quadratic constraints to formulate a small linear matrix…
This paper proposes SplitSGD, a new dynamic learning rate schedule for stochastic optimization. This method decreases the learning rate for better adaptation to the local geometry of the objective function whenever a stationary phase is…