Related papers: Lower Complexity Bounds of First-order Methods for…
We provide tight upper and lower bounds on the complexity of minimizing the average of $m$ convex functions using gradient and prox oracles of the component functions. We show a significant gap between the complexity of deterministic vs…
Motivated by big data applications, first-order methods have been extremely popular in recent years. However, naive gradient methods generally converge slowly. Hence, much efforts have been made to accelerate various first-order methods.…
We consider the oracle complexity of constrained convex optimization given access to a Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO) for the constraint set and a gradient oracle for the $L$-smooth, strongly convex objective. This model includes…
We introduce PF-AGD, the first parameter-free, deterministic, accelerated first-order method to achieve $O(\epsilon^{-5/3}\log(1/\epsilon))$ oracle complexity bound when minimizing sufficiently smooth, non-convex functions; this is the…
We study the quadratic penalty method (QPM) for smooth nonconvex optimization problems with equality constraints. Assuming the constraint violation satisfies the PL condition near the feasible set, we derive sharper worst-case complexity…
An adaptive regularization algorithm for unconstrained nonconvex optimization is proposed that is capable of handling inexact objective-function and derivative values, and also of providing approximate minimizer of arbitrary order. In…
A regularization algorithm using inexact function values and inexact derivatives is proposed and its evaluation complexity analyzed. This algorithm is applicable to unconstrained problems and to problems with inexpensive constraints (that…
We consider a class of convex optimization problems over the simplex of probability measures. Our framework comprises optimal experimental design (OED) problems, in which the measure over the design space indicates which experiments are…
While first-order stationary points (FOSPs) are the traditional targets of non-convex optimization, they often correspond to undesirable strict saddle points. To circumvent this, attention has shifted towards second-order stationary points…
We analyze worst-case convergence guarantees of first-order optimization methods over a function class extending that of smooth and convex functions. This class contains convex functions that admit a simple quadratic upper bound. Its study…
In this paper we study a class of constrained minimax problems. In particular, we propose a first-order augmented Lagrangian method for solving them, whose subproblems turn out to be a much simpler structured minimax problem and are…
Recent advances in randomized incremental methods for minimizing $L$-smooth $\mu$-strongly convex finite sums have culminated in tight complexity of $\tilde{O}((n+\sqrt{n L/\mu})\log(1/\epsilon))$ and $O(n+\sqrt{nL/\epsilon})$, where…
Second-order methods are of great importance for composite convex optimization problems due to their local super-linear convergence rates (under appropriate assumptions). However, the presence of even a simple nonsmooth function in the…
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…
In this paper, we design and analyze a new family of adaptive subgradient methods for solving an important class of weakly convex (possibly nonsmooth) stochastic optimization problems. Adaptive methods that use exponential moving averages…
We present an information-theoretic approach to lower bound the oracle complexity of nonsmooth black box convex optimization, unifying previous lower bounding techniques by identifying a combinatorial problem, namely string guessing, as a…
We consider a class of popular distributed non-convex optimization problems, in which agents connected by a network $\mathcal{G}$ collectively optimize a sum of smooth (possibly non-convex) local objective functions. We address the…
We prove lower bounds on the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (points $x$ such that $\|\nabla f(x)\| \le \epsilon$) of smooth, high-dimensional, and potentially non-convex functions $f$. We consider oracle-based complexity…
It is well-known that given a smooth, bounded-from-below, and possibly nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$…
We revisit the standard ``telescoping sum'' argument ubiquitous in the final steps of analyzing evaluation complexity of algorithms for smooth nonconvex optimization, and obtain a refined formulation of the resulting bound as a function of…