Related papers: On the Hardness of Meaningful Local Guarantees in …
In this paper, we present several new results on minimizing a nonsmooth and nonconvex function under a Lipschitz condition. Recent work shows that while the classical notion of Clarke stationarity is computationally intractable up to some…
We initiate the study of nonsmooth optimization problems under bounded local subgradient variation, which postulates bounded difference between (sub)gradients in small local regions around points, in either average or maximum sense. The…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…
Randomized smoothing is a widely adopted technique for optimizing nonsmooth objective functions. However, its efficiency analysis typically relies on global Lipschitz continuity, a condition rarely met in practical applications. To address…
We study the complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz objectives which are possibly neither smooth nor convex, using only noisy function evaluations. Recent works proposed several stochastic zero-order…
We study the oracle complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz functions, in the sense proposed by Zhang et al. [2020]. While there exist dimension-free randomized algorithms for producing such points within…
Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in…
We study local complexity measures for stochastic convex optimization problems, providing a local minimax theory analogous to that of H\'{a}jek and Le Cam for classical statistical problems. We give complementary optimality results,…
We study unconstrained optimization problems of nonsmooth, nonconvex Lipschitz functions, using only noisy pairwise comparisons governed by a known link function. Our goal is to compute a $(\delta,\varepsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point.…
We consider the computation of an approximately stationary point for a Lipschitz and semialgebraic function $f$ with a local oracle. If $f$ is smooth, simple deterministic methods have dimension-free finite oracle complexities. For the…
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…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
This paper presents an extension of stochastic gradient descent for the minimization of Lipschitz continuous loss functions. Our motivation is for use in non-smooth non-convex stochastic optimization problems, which are frequently…
Despite its important applications in Machine Learning, min-max optimization of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives remains elusive. Not only are there no known first-order methods converging even to approximate local min-max points, but the…
This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…
Finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point of a nonconvex function with a Lipschitz continuous Hessian is a central problem in optimization. Regularized Newton methods are a classical tool and have been studied extensively, yet they still face…
Classical assumptions like strong convexity and Lipschitz smoothness often fail to capture the nature of deep learning optimization problems, which are typically non-convex and non-smooth, making traditional analyses less applicable. This…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…
This paper considers the nonconvex nonsmooth problem in which the objective function is Lipschitz continuous. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access stochastic function value evaluations with heavy-tailed noise,…