Related papers: New Lower Bounds for Stochastic Non-Convex Optimiz…
In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…
We study the iteration complexity of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for minimizing the gradient norm of smooth, possibly nonconvex functions. We provide several results, implying that the $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ upper bound of…
When the nonconvex problem is complicated by stochasticity, the sample complexity of stochastic first-order methods may depend linearly on the problem dimension, which is undesirable for large-scale problems. To alleviate this linear…
We propose a single time-scale stochastic subgradient method for constrained optimization of a composition of several nonsmooth and nonconvex functions. The functions are assumed to be locally Lipschitz and differentiable in a generalized…
There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…
We show that many machine learning goals, such as improved fairness metrics, can be expressed as constraints on the model's predictions, which we call rate constraints. We study the problem of training non-convex models subject to these…
We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: the problem of minimizing the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex loss functions. A recent work of Bassily et al. (2019)…
We propose and analyze a sequential quadratic programming algorithm for minimizing a noisy nonlinear smooth function subject to noisy nonlinear smooth equality constraints. The algorithm uses a step decomposition strategy and, as a result,…
This paper studies minimax optimization problems $\min_x \max_y f(x,y)$, where $f(x,y)$ is $m_x$-strongly convex with respect to $x$, $m_y$-strongly concave with respect to $y$ and $(L_x,L_{xy},L_y)$-smooth. Zhang et al. provided the…
In this paper, we consider the minimization of a nonsmooth nonconvex objective function $f(x)$ over a closed convex subset $\mathcal{X}$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, with additional nonsmooth nonconvex constraints $c(x) = 0$. We develop a unified…
We propose new continuous-time formulations for first-order stochastic optimization algorithms such as mini-batch gradient descent and variance-reduced methods. We exploit these continuous-time models, together with simple Lyapunov analysis…
Stochastic convex optimization problems with nonlinear functional constraints are ubiquitous in signal processing applications including constrained least-squares, set-membership adaptive filtering, and trajectory optimization under…
An algorithm based on the interior-point methodology for solving continuous nonlinearly constrained optimization problems is proposed, analyzed, and tested. The distinguishing feature of the algorithm is that it presumes that only noisy…
We study non-smooth stochastic decentralized optimization problems over time-varying networks, where objective functions are distributed across nodes and network connections may intermittently appear or break. Specifically, we consider two…
We consider the problem of stochastic convex optimization under convex constraints. We analyze the behavior of a natural variance reduced proximal gradient (VRPG) algorithm for this problem. Our main result is a non-asymptotic guarantee for…
$L_0$-smoothness, which has been pivotal to advancing decentralized optimization theory, is often fairly restrictive for modern tasks like deep learning. The recent advent of relaxed $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness condition enables improved…
In this paper, we define a new type of nonsmooth convex function, called {\em first-order SDSOS-convex semi-algebraic function}, which is an extension of the previously proposed first-order SDSOS-convex polynomials (Chuong et al. in J…
Motivated by recent work of Renegar, we present new computational methods and associated computational guarantees for solving convex optimization problems using first-order methods. Our problem of interest is the general convex optimization…
We revisit a classical assumption for analyzing stochastic gradient algorithms where the squared norm of the stochastic subgradient (or the variance for smooth problems) is allowed to grow as fast as the squared norm of the optimization…
The usual approach to developing and analyzing first-order methods for smooth convex optimization assumes that the gradient of the objective function is uniformly smooth with some Lipschitz constant $L$. However, in many settings the…