Related papers: Stochastic optimization over expectation-formulate…
In this paper, we study the problem of escaping from saddle points in smooth nonconvex optimization problems subject to a convex set $\mathcal{C}$. We propose a generic framework that yields convergence to a second-order stationary point of…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
We propose a novel generalization of the conditional gradient (CG / Frank-Wolfe) algorithm for minimizing a smooth function $f$ under an intersection of compact convex sets, using a first-order oracle for $\nabla f$ and linear minimization…
Principal component analysis is a simple yet useful dimensionality reduction technique in modern machine learning pipelines. In consequential domains such as college admission, healthcare and credit approval, it is imperative to take into…
Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence…
We develop two compression based stochastic gradient algorithms to solve a class of non-smooth strongly convex-strongly concave saddle-point problems in a decentralized setting (without a central server). Our first algorithm is a…
We consider a class of nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization problems over the Stiefel manifold where the objective function is the summation of a nonconvex smooth function and a nonsmooth Lipschitz continuous convex function composed with…
Stochastic compositional optimization generalizes classic (non-compositional) stochastic optimization to the minimization of compositions of functions. Each composition may introduce an additional expectation. The series of expectations may…
We provide the first study of the problem of finding differentially private (DP) second-order stationary points (SOSP) in stochastic (non-convex) minimax optimization. Existing literature either focuses only on first-order stationary points…
Many machine learning, statistical inference, and portfolio optimization problems require minimization of a composition of expected value functions (CEVF). Of particular interest is the finite-sum versions of such compositional optimization…
We investigate the convergence properties of a stochastic primal-dual splitting algorithm for solving structured monotone inclusions involving the sum of a cocoercive operator and a composite monotone operator. The proposed method is the…
Decentralized optimization algorithms have attracted intensive interests recently, as it has a balanced communication pattern, especially when solving large-scale machine learning problems. Stochastic Path Integrated Differential Estimator…
In this work, we study the asymptotic randomness of an algorithmic estimator of the saddle point of a globally convex-concave and locally strongly-convex strongly-concave objective. Specifically, we show that the averaged iterates of a…
Orthogonality constraints naturally appear in many machine learning problems, from principal component analysis to robust neural network training. They are usually solved using Riemannian optimization algorithms, which minimize the…
In this paper, we propose a general algorithmic framework to solve a class of optimization problems on the product of complex Stiefel manifolds based on the matrix polar decomposition. We establish the weak convergence, global convergence…
We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…
Stochastic-gradient-based optimization has been a core enabling methodology in applications to large-scale problems in machine learning and related areas. Despite the progress, the gap between theory and practice remains significant, with…
For solving pseudo-convex global optimization problems, we present a novel fully adaptive steepest descent method (or ASDM) without any hard-to-estimate parameters. For the step-size regulation in an $\varepsilon$-normalized direction, we…
The stochastic subgradient method is a widely-used algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems arising in machine learning. Often these problems are neither smooth nor convex. Recently, Davis et al. [1-2] characterized the…
Gradient-based methods are well-suited for derivative-free optimization (DFO), where finite-difference (FD) estimates are commonly used as gradient surrogates. Traditional stochastic approximation methods, such as Kiefer-Wolfowitz (KW) and…