Related papers: Variable Bregman Majorization-Minimization Algorit…
This paper considers non-smooth optimization problems where we seek to minimize the pointwise maximum of a continuously parameterized family of functions. Since the objective function is given as the solution to a maximization problem,…
The recently developed Distributed Block Proximal Method, for solving stochastic big-data convex optimization problems, is studied in this paper under the assumption of constant stepsizes and strongly convex (possibly non-smooth) local…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…
Variance components estimation and mixed model analysis are central themes in statistics with applications in numerous scientific disciplines. Despite the best efforts of generations of statisticians and numerical analysts, maximum…
We propose a novel randomized incremental gradient algorithm, namely, VAriance-Reduced Accelerated Gradient (Varag), for finite-sum optimization. Equipped with a unified step-size policy that adjusts itself to the value of the condition…
Recently, minimax optimization received renewed focus due to modern applications in machine learning, robust optimization, and reinforcement learning. The scale of these applications naturally leads to the use of first-order methods.…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
The Blahut-Arimoto algorithm is a well-known method to compute classical channel capacities and rate-distortion functions. Recent works have extended this algorithm to compute various quantum analogs of these quantities. In this paper, we…
We survey incremental methods for minimizing a sum $\sum_{i=1}^mf_i(x)$ consisting of a large number of convex component functions $f_i$. Our methods consist of iterations applied to single components, and have proved very effective in…
The goal of the paper is development of an optimization method with the superlinear convergence rate for a nonsmooth convex function. For optimization an approximation is used that is similar to the Steklov integral averaging. The…
We introduce and analyze an algorithm for the minimization of convex functions that are the sum of differentiable terms and proximable terms composed with linear operators. The method builds upon the recently developed smoothed gap…
The proximal gradient method is a splitting algorithm for the minimization of the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth. It has applications in areas such as mechanics, inverse problems, machine learning, image reconstruction,…
This work investigates the convergence behavior of augmented Lagrangian methods (ALMs) when applied to convex optimization problems that may be infeasible. ALMs are a popular class of algorithms for solving constrained optimization…
We derive a new margin-based regularization formulation, termed multi-margin regularization (MMR), for deep neural networks (DNNs). The MMR is inspired by principles that were applied in margin analysis of shallow linear classifiers, e.g.,…
We propose a variable metric framework for minimizing the sum of a self-concordant function and a possibly non-smooth convex function, endowed with an easily computable proximal operator. We theoretically establish the convergence of our…
In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…
A restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a two-layer neural network with shared weights and has been extensively studied for dimensionality reduction, data representation and recommendation systems in the literature. The traditional RBM…
In this paper, we propose new accelerated methods for smooth convex optimization, called contracting proximal methods. At every step of these methods, we need to minimize a contracted version of the objective function augmented by a…
Variational Bayes (VB) has become a widely-used tool for Bayesian inference in statistics and machine learning. Nonetheless, the development of the existing VB algorithms is so far generally restricted to the case where the variational…
The proximal bundle method (PBM) is a fundamental and computationally effective algorithm for solving nonsmooth optimization problems. In this paper, we present the first variant of the PBM for smooth objectives, achieving an accelerated…