Related papers: Variance-reduced first-order methods for determini…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…
We consider minimization of stochastic functionals that are compositions of a (potentially) non-smooth convex function $h$ and smooth function $c$ and, more generally, stochastic weakly-convex functionals. We develop a family of stochastic…
This work examines the convergence of stochastic gradient-based optimization algorithms that use early stopping based on a validation function. The form of early stopping we consider is that optimization terminates when the norm of the…
First-order methods with momentum such as Nesterov's fast gradient method are very useful for convex optimization problems, but can exhibit undesirable oscillations yielding slow convergence rates for some applications. An adaptive…
On solving a convex-concave bilinear saddle-point problem (SPP), there have been many works studying the complexity results of first-order methods. These results are all about upper complexity bounds, which can determine at most how many…
For minimizing a strongly convex objective function subject to linear inequality constraints, we consider a penalty approach that allows one to utilize stochastic methods for problems with a large number of constraints and/or objective…
We consider the problem of minimizing a differentiable function with locally Lipschitz continuous gradient on a stratified set and present a first-order algorithm designed to find a stationary point of that problem. Our assumptions on the…
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 study a class of bilevel optimization problems in which both the upper- and lower-level problems have minimax structures. This setting captures a broad range of emerging applications. Despite the extensive literature on bilevel…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…
Gradient methods are widely used in optimization problems. In practice, while the smoothness parameter can be estimated utilizing techniques such as backtracking, estimating the strong convexity parameter remains a challenge; moreover, even…
We propose a projection-free conditional gradient-type algorithm for smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions and the constraint set is a closed convex…
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,…
We propose two novel conditional gradient-based methods for solving structured stochastic convex optimization problems with a large number of linear constraints. Instances of this template naturally arise from SDP-relaxations of…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems with affine constraints and develop several methods using either primal or dual approach to solve it. In the primal case, we use a special penalization technique to make the initial…
When the nonconvex problem is complicated by stochasticity, the sample complexity of stochastic first-order methods may depend linearly on the problem dimension, which is undesirable for large-scale problems. To alleviate this linear…
This paper considers unconstrained convex optimization problems with time-varying objective functions. We propose algorithms with a discrete time-sampling scheme to find and track the solution trajectory based on prediction and correction…
Stochastic minimax optimization on Riemannian manifolds has recently attracted significant attention due to its broad range of applications, such as robust training of neural networks and robust maximum likelihood estimation. Existing…
We consider a regularized expected reward optimization problem in the non-oblivious setting that covers many existing problems in reinforcement learning (RL). In order to solve such an optimization problem, we apply and analyze the…