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Nonconvex optimization refers to the process of solving problems whose objective or constraints are nonconvex. Historically, this type of problems have been very difficult to solve to global optimality, with traditional solvers often…
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…
In this paper we first study a smooth optimization approach for solving a class of nonsmooth strictly concave maximization problems whose objective functions admit smooth convex minimization reformulations. In particular, we apply…
In this paper we consider a distributed stochastic optimization problem without the gradient/subgradient information for the local objective functions, subject to local convex constraints. The objective functions may be non-smooth and…
We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…
We propose a novel method that solves global optimization problems in two steps: (1) perform a (exponential) power-$N$ transformation to the not-necessarily differentiable objective function $f$ and get $f_N$, and (2) optimize the…
We consider the problem of finding critical points of functions that are non-convex and non-smooth. Studying a fairly broad class of such problems, we analyze the behavior of three gradient-based methods (gradient descent, proximal update,…
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…
We study a class of optimization problems on Riemannian manifolds, where the objective function consists of a smooth term and quasi-norm type penalties with exponent $p \in (0, 1]$. The essential difficulty lies in the fact that 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…
In this work we survey some recent results on the global minimization of a non-convex and possibly non-smooth high dimensional objective function by means of particle based gradient-free methods. Such problems arise in many situations of…
We propose several new nonsmooth Newton methods for solving convex composite optimization problems with polyhedral regularizers, while avoiding the computation of complicated second-order information on these functions. Under the…
Non-convex optimization is a critical tool in advancing machine learning, especially for complex models like deep neural networks and support vector machines. Despite challenges such as multiple local minima and saddle points, non-convex…
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…
In this paper, we present a generic framework to extend existing uniformly optimal convex programming algorithms to solve more general nonlinear, possibly nonconvex, optimization problems. The basic idea is to incorporate a local search…
In this paper, we propose an inexact block coordinate descent algorithm for large-scale nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems. At each iteration, a particular block variable is selected and updated by inexactly solving the original…
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
This paper investigates the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by the summation of $n$ local cost functions. We solve such a problem by involving zeroth-order (ZO) information…
This paper presents a subgradient-based algorithm for constrained nonsmooth convex optimization that does not require projections onto the feasible set. While the well-established Frank-Wolfe algorithm and its variants already avoid…
In this note, we focus on smooth nonconvex optimization problems that obey: (1) all local minimizers are also global; and (2) around any saddle point or local maximizer, the objective has a negative directional curvature. Concrete…