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This note studies the distributed non-convex optimization problem with non-smooth regularization, which has wide applications in decentralized learning, estimation and control. The objective function is the sum of different local objective…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely adopted iterative method for optimizing differentiable objective functions. In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach to scale up SGD in applications involving non-convex functions…
We propose a novel single-loop decentralized algorithm called DGDA-VR for solving the stochastic nonconvex strongly-concave minimax problem over a connected network of $M$ agents. By using stochastic first-order oracles to estimate the…
The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…
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 study the canonical statistical estimation problem of linear regression from $n$ i.i.d.~examples under $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy when some response variables are adversarially corrupted. We propose a variant of the…
We introduce Probabilistic Gaussian Homotopy (PGH), a probability-space continuation framework for nonconvex optimization. Unlike classical Gaussian homotopy, which smooths the objective and uniformly averages gradients, PGH deforms the…
Stochastic convex optimization is one of the most well-studied models for learning in modern machine learning. Nevertheless, a central fundamental question in this setup remained unresolved: "How many data points must be observed so that…
This work aims to solve a stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth composite optimization problem. Previous works on composite optimization problem requires the major part to satisfy Lipschitz smoothness or some relaxed smoothness conditions, which…
We study the decentralized optimization problem $\min_{{\bf x}\in{\mathbb R}^d} f({\bf x})\triangleq \frac{1}{m}\sum_{i=1}^m f_i({\bf x})$, where the local function on the $i$-th agent has the form of $f_i({\bf x})\triangleq…
We develop a new reduction that converts any online convex optimization algorithm suffering $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret into an $\epsilon$-differentially private stochastic convex optimization algorithm with the optimal convergence rate $\tilde…
Temporal-Difference (TD) learning with nonlinear smooth function approximation for policy evaluation has achieved great success in modern reinforcement learning. It is shown that such a problem can be reformulated as a stochastic…
This paper introduces a novel Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) algorithm for solving discrete-time finite-horizon optimal control problems with inequality constraints. Two variants, namely Feasible- and Infeasible-IPDDP algorithms,…
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 develop a short-step interior point method to optimize a linear function over a convex body assuming that one only knows a membership oracle for this body. The approach is based on Abernethy and Hazan's sketch of a universal interior…
A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…
Uniform stability is a notion of algorithmic stability that bounds the worst case change in the model output by the algorithm when a single data point in the dataset is replaced. An influential work of Hardt et al. (2016) provides strong…
We study the classical problem of community recovery in stochastic block models with a fixed number of communities, with a twist: We seek algorithms that are stable with respect to node-wise changes in the graph structure, formally defined…
We introduce a class of stochastic algorithms for minimizing weakly convex functions over proximally smooth sets. As their main building blocks, the algorithms use simplified models of the objective function and the constraint set, along…
Decentralized optimization is a promising parallel computation paradigm for large-scale data analytics and machine learning problems defined over a network of nodes. This paper is concerned with decentralized non-convex composite problems…