Related papers: Testing Approximate Stationarity Concepts for Piec…
We study the parameterized complexity of testing approximate first-order stationarity at a prescribed point for continuous piecewise-affine (PA) functions, a basic task in nonsmooth optimization. PA functions form a canonical model for…
We report a practical finite-time algorithmic scheme to compute approximately stationary points for nonconvex nonsmooth Lipschitz functions. In particular, we are interested in two kinds of approximate stationarity notions for nonconvex…
We study the computational problem of the stationarity test for the empirical loss of neural networks with ReLU activation functions. Our contributions are: Hardness: We show that checking a certain first-order approximate stationarity…
This paper proposes low-complexity algorithms for finding approximate second-order stationary points (SOSPs) of problems with smooth non-convex objective and linear constraints. While finding (approximate) SOSPs is computationally…
We show that computing even very coarse approximations of critical points is intractable for simple classes of nonconvex functions. More concretely, we prove that if there exists a polynomial-time algorithm that takes as input a polynomial…
This paper is devoted to studying the first-order variational analysis of non-convex and non-differentiable functions that may not be subdifferentially regular. To achieve this goal, we entirely rely on two concepts of directional…
It is well-known that given a bounded, smooth nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (where the gradient norm is less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ iterations. However,…
We prove lower bounds on the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (points $x$ such that $\|\nabla f(x)\| \le \epsilon$) of smooth, high-dimensional, and potentially non-convex functions $f$. We consider oracle-based complexity…
Finding approximate stationary points, i.e., points where the gradient is approximately zero, of non-convex but smooth objective functions $f$ over unrestricted $d$-dimensional domains is one of the most fundamental problems in classical…
We survey developments, over the last thirty years, in the theory of Shape Preserving Approximation (SPA) by algebraic polynomials on a finite interval. In this article, "shape" refers to (finitely many changes of) monotonicity, convexity,…
We design a new, fast algorithm for agnostically learning univariate probability distributions whose densities are well approximated by piecewise polynomial functions. Let $f$ be the density function of an arbitrary univariate distribution,…
PieceWise Affine (PWA) approximations for nonlinear functions have been extensively used for tractable, computationally efficient control of nonlinear systems. However, reaching a desired approximation accuracy without prior information…
We consider the problem of provably finding a stationary point of a smooth function to be minimized on the variety of bounded-rank matrices. This turns out to be unexpectedly delicate. We trace the difficulty back to a geometric obstacle:…
This paper demonstrates that the space of piecewise smooth functions can be well approximated by the space of functions defined by a set of simple (non-linear) operations on smooth uniform splines. The examples include bivariate functions…
We give a new fast method for evaluating sprectral approximations of nonlinear polynomial functionals. We prove that the new algorithm is convergent if the functions considered are smooth enough, under a general assumption on the spectral…
In large-scale applications, such as machine learning, it is desirable to design non-convex optimization algorithms with a high degree of parallelization. In this work, we study the adaptive complexity of finding a stationary point, which…
We consider the proximal-gradient method for minimizing an objective function that is the sum of a smooth function and a non-smooth convex function. A feature that distinguishes our work from most in the literature is that we assume that…
We suggest a new optimization technique for minimizing the sum $\sum_{i=1}^n f_i(x)$ of $n$ non-convex real functions that satisfy a property that we call piecewise log-Lipschitz. This is by forging links between techniques in computational…
In this paper, we propose a successive pseudo-convex approximation algorithm to efficiently compute stationary points for a large class of possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The stationary points are obtained by solving a sequence of…
In this paper we consider the problem of finding $\epsilon$-approximate stationary points of convex functions that are $p$-times differentiable with $\nu$-H\"{o}lder continuous $p$th derivatives. We present tensor methods with and without…