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Acceleration is a celebrated cornerstone of convex optimization, enabling gradient-based algorithms to converge sublinearly in the condition number. A major open question is whether an analogous acceleration phenomenon is possible for…
We develop nested automatic differentiation (AD) algorithms for exact inference and learning in integer latent variable models. Recently, Winner, Sujono, and Sheldon showed how to reduce marginalization in a class of integer latent variable…
This paper presents two new techniques relating to inexact solution of subproblems in augmented Lagrangian methods for convex programming. The first involves combining a relative error criterion for solution of the subproblems with over- or…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
We consider the problem of maximizing submodular functions; while this problem is known to be NP-hard, several numerically efficient local search techniques with approximation guarantees are available. In this paper, we propose a novel…
We consider a convex unconstrained optimization problem that arises in a network of agents whose goal is to cooperatively optimize the sum of the individual agent objective functions through local computations and communications. For this…
In this paper we consider convex optimization problems with stochastic composite objective function subject to (possibly) infinite intersection of constraints. The objective function is expressed in terms of expectation operator over a sum…
We investigate the techniques and ideas used in the convergence analysis of two proximal ADMM algorithms for solving convex optimization problems involving compositions with linear operators. Besides this, we formulate a variant of the ADMM…
Differentiable programming is revolutionizing computational science by enabling automatic differentiation (AD) of numerical simulations. While first-order gradients are well-established, second-order derivatives (Hessians) for implicit…
Alignment of large language models remains a central challenge in natural language processing. Preference optimization has emerged as a popular and effective method for improving alignment, typically through training-time or prompt-based…
Conditional gradients constitute a class of projection-free first-order algorithms for smooth convex optimization. As such, they are frequently used in solving smooth convex optimization problems over polytopes, for which the computational…
This paper is devoted to first-order algorithms for smooth convex optimization with inexact gradients. Unlike the majority of the literature on this topic, we consider the setting of relative rather than absolute inexactness. More…
First order methods endowed with global convergence guarantees operate using global lower bounds on the objective. The tightening of the bounds has been shown to increase both the theoretical guarantees and the practical performance. In…
The subgradient method is a classical and foundational approach in non-smooth convex optimization; its simplicity, robustness, and role as a conceptual and algorithmic starting point have made it the backbone of many significant…
In this paper, we generalize the well-known Nesterov's accelerated gradient (AG) method, originally designed for convex smooth optimization, to solve nonconvex and possibly stochastic optimization problems. We demonstrate that by properly…
Adaptive optimization methods have been widely used in deep learning. They scale the learning rates adaptively according to the past gradient, which has been shown to be effective to accelerate the convergence. However, they suffer from…
A large class of non-smooth practical optimization problems can be written as minimization of a sum of smooth and partly smooth functions. We examine such structured problems which also depend on a parameter vector and study the problem of…
Low-rank matrix estimation is a canonical problem that finds numerous applications in signal processing, machine learning and imaging science. A popular approach in practice is to factorize the matrix into two compact low-rank factors, and…
We develop a novel framework to study smooth and strongly convex optimization algorithms, both deterministic and stochastic. Focusing on quadratic functions we are able to examine optimization algorithms as a recursive application of linear…
In this work, we introduce a new class of non-convex functions, called implicit concave functions, which are compositions of a concave function with a continuously differentiable mapping. We analyze the properties of their minimization by…