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We analyze convergence rates of stochastic optimization procedures for non-smooth convex optimization problems. By combining randomized smoothing techniques with accelerated gradient methods, we obtain convergence rates of stochastic…
In this paper, we present a stochastic gradient algorithm for minimizing a smooth objective function that is an expectation over noisy cost samples, and only the latter are observed for any given parameter. Our algorithm employs a gradient…
We consider the problem of minimizing a composite convex function with two different access methods: an oracle, for which we can evaluate the value and gradient, and a structured function, which we access only by solving a convex…
In this paper, we consider a stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem with the cost function being distributed over $n$ agents having access only to zeroth-order (ZO) information of the cost. This problem has various machine…
Consider the problem of minimizing an expected logarithmic loss over either the probability simplex or the set of quantum density matrices. This problem includes tasks such as solving the Poisson inverse problem, computing the…
In this paper, we study the portfolio optimization problem with general utility functions and when the return and volatility of underlying asset are slowly varying. An asymptotic optimal strategy is provided within a specific class of…
We present an information-theoretic approach to lower bound the oracle complexity of nonsmooth black box convex optimization, unifying previous lower bounding techniques by identifying a combinatorial problem, namely string guessing, as a…
We introduce BLOC (Black-box Optimization over Correlation matrices), a general framework for sparse covariance estimation with non-convex penalties. BLOC operates on the manifold of correlation matrices and reparameterizes it via an…
This paper is devoted to solving a convex stochastic optimization problem in a overparameterization setup for the case where the original gradient computation is not available, but an objective function value can be computed. For this class…
In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…
Acceleration is an increasingly common theme in the stochastic optimization literature. The two most common examples are Nesterov's method, and Polyak's momentum technique. In this paper two new algorithms are introduced for root finding…
In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that only stochastic information of the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle…
This paper considers global optimization with a black-box unknown objective function that can be non-convex and non-differentiable. Such a difficult optimization problem arises in many real-world applications, such as parameter tuning in…
Universal methods for optimization are designed to achieve theoretically optimal convergence rates without any prior knowledge of the problem's regularity parameters or the accurarcy of the gradient oracle employed by the optimizer. In this…
We build a unifying convex analysis framework characterizing the statistical properties of a large class of penalized estimators, both under a regular and an irregular design. Our framework interprets penalized estimators as proximal…
This paper investigates how to accelerate the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on nonconvex problems with zeroth-order information available only. We propose a zeroth-order (ZO) distributed primal-dual stochastic…
Motivated by decentralized sensing and policy evaluation problems, we consider a particular type of distributed stochastic optimization problem over a network, called the online stochastic distributed averaging problem. We design a…
Stochastic constraints, which incorporate both deterministic parameters and random variables, extend classical deterministic constraints by explicitly accounting for uncertainty. These constraints are increasingly prevalent in data science,…
Robust optimization is a common framework in optimization under uncertainty when the problem parameters are not known, but it is rather known that the parameters belong to some given uncertainty set. In the robust optimization framework the…
Packing optimization is a prevalent problem that necessitates robust and efficient algorithms that are also simple to implement. One group of approaches is the raster methods, which rely on approximating the objects with pixelated…