Related papers: Revisiting Stochastic Proximal Point Methods: Gene…

Supervised machine learning approaches require the formulation of a loss functional to be minimized in the training phase. Sequential data are ubiquitous across many fields of research, and are often treated with Euclidean distance-based…

Classical assumptions like strong convexity and Lipschitz smoothness often fail to capture the nature of deep learning optimization problems, which are typically non-convex and non-smooth, making traditional analyses less applicable. This…

In this paper we measured the stability of stochastic gradient method (SGM) for learning an approximated Fourier primal support vector machine. The stability of an algorithm is considered by measuring the generalization error in terms of…

In this paper, we present the proximal-proximal-gradient method (PPG), a novel optimization method that is simple to implement and simple to parallelize. PPG generalizes the proximal-gradient method and ADMM and is applicable to…

Many practical optimization problems lack strong convexity. Fortunately, recent studies have revealed that first-order algorithms also enjoy linear convergences under various weaker regularity conditions. While the relationship among…

In a wide range of applications, the stochastic properties of the observed time series change over time. The changes often occur gradually rather than abruptly: the properties are (approximately) constant for some time and then slowly start…

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

For strongly convex objectives that are smooth, the classical theory of gradient descent ensures linear convergence relative to the number of gradient evaluations. An analogous nonsmooth theory is challenging. Even when the objective is…

Several problems in modeling and control of stochastically-driven dynamical systems can be cast as regularized semi-definite programs. We examine two such representative problems and show that they can be formulated in a similar manner. The…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…

We consider stochastic optimization problems involving an expected value of a nonlinear function of a base random vector and a conditional expectation of another function depending on the base random vector, a dependent random vector, and…

This paper formalizes and analyzes Gaussian smoothing applied to two prominent optimization methods: Stochastic Gradient Descent (GSmoothSGD) and Adam (GSmoothAdam) in deep learning. By attenuating small fluctuations, Gaussian smoothing…

This paper investigates the problems large-scale distributed composite convex optimization, with motivations from a broad range of applications, including multi-agent systems, federated learning, smart grids, wireless sensor networks,…

Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence…

We consider minimizing $f(x) = \mathbb{E}[f(x,\omega)]$ when $f(x,\omega)$ is possibly nonsmooth and either strongly convex or convex in $x$. (I) Strongly convex. When $f(x,\omega)$ is $\mu-$strongly convex in $x$, we propose a variable…

We define a stochastic variant of the proximal point algorithm in the general setting of nonlinear (separable) Hadamard spaces for approximating zeros of the mean of a stochastically perturbed monotone vector field and prove its convergence…

Variational Inequality (VI) problems have attracted great interest in the machine learning (ML) community due to their application in adversarial and multi-agent training. Despite its relevance in ML, the oft-used strong-monotonicity and…

In this work, we propose and study a framework of generalized proximal point algorithms associated with a maximally monotone operator. We indicate sufficient conditions on the regularization and relaxation parameters of generalized proximal…

We study sampling problems associated with potentials that lack smoothness. The potentials can be either convex or non-convex. Departing from the standard smooth setting, the potentials are only assumed to be weakly smooth or non-smooth, or…

In this paper we develop proximal methods for statistical learning. Proximal point algorithms are useful in statistics and machine learning for obtaining optimization solutions for composite functions. Our approach exploits closed-form…