Related papers: Revisiting Stochastic Proximal Point Methods: Gene…
We consider the unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is composed of a smooth and a non-smooth conponents where the smooth component is the expectation a random function. This type of problem arises in some interesting…
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…
The Proximal Point Method (PPM) (Rockafellar, 1976) is a fundamental tool for nonsmooth convex optimization. However, its convergence is not linear under general convexity in the absence of strong convexity or other structural assumptions.…
Stochastic versions of proximal methods have gained much attention in statistics and machine learning. These algorithms tend to admit simple, scalable forms, and enjoy numerical stability via implicit updates. In this work, we propose and…
We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…
We address composite optimization problems, which consist in minimizing the sum of a smooth and a merely lower semicontinuous function, without any convexity assumptions. Numerical solutions of these problems can be obtained by proximal…
We develop an implementable stochastic proximal point (SPP) method for a class of weakly convex, composite optimization problems. The proposed stochastic proximal point algorithm incorporates a variance reduction mechanism and the resulting…
Sparse learning is a very important tool for mining useful information and patterns from high dimensional data. Non-convex non-smooth regularized learning problems play essential roles in sparse learning, and have drawn extensive attentions…
In the context of finite sums minimization, variance reduction techniques are widely used to improve the performance of state-of-the-art stochastic gradient methods. Their practical impact is clear, as well as their theoretical properties.…
We consider solving nonconvex composite optimization problems in which the sum of a smooth function and a nonsmooth function is minimized. Many of convergence analyses of proximal gradient-type methods rely on global descent property…
We study the optimization of non-convex functions that are not necessarily smooth (gradient and/or Hessian are Lipschitz) using first order methods. Smoothness is a restrictive assumption in machine learning in both theory and practice,…
In this paper we consider stochastic composite convex optimization problems with the objective function satisfying a stochastic bounded gradient condition, with or without a quadratic functional growth property. These models include the…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
We reconsider randomized algorithms for the low-rank approximation of symmetric positive semi-definite (SPSD) matrices such as Laplacian and kernel matrices that arise in data analysis and machine learning applications. Our main results…
Composite optimization problems, where the sum of a smooth and a merely lower semicontinuous function has to be minimized, are often tackled numerically by means of proximal gradient methods as soon as the lower semicontinuous part of the…
Robust optimization provides a principled and unified framework to model many problems in modern operations research and computer science applications, such as risk measures minimization and adversarially robust machine learning. To use a…
Stochastic Proximal Gradient (SPG) methods have been widely used for solving optimization problems with a simple (possibly non-smooth) regularizer in machine learning and statistics. However, to the best of our knowledge no non-asymptotic…
In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…
Monotone inclusions have a wide range of applications, including minimization, saddle-point, and equilibria problems. We introduce new stochastic algorithms, with or without variance reduction, to estimate a root of the expectation of…
Non-smooth and non-convex global optimization poses significant challenges across various applications, where standard gradient-based methods often struggle. We propose the Ball-Proximal Point Method, Broximal Point Method, or Ball Point…