Related papers: Algorithmic approaches to avoiding bad local minim…
In this work, we propose some new Douglas-Rashford splitting algorithms for solving a class of generalized DC (difference of convex functions) in real Hilbert spaces. The proposed methods leverage the proximal properties of the nonsmooth…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…
Motivated by recent increased interest in optimization algorithms for non-convex optimization in application to training deep neural networks and other optimization problems in data analysis, we give an overview of recent theoretical…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
Convex optimization has become ubiquitous in most quantitative disciplines of science, including variational image processing. Proximal splitting algorithms are becoming popular to solve such structured convex optimization problems. Within…
We consider optimization problems in which the goal is find a $k$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{R}^n$, $k<<n$, which minimizes a convex and smooth loss. Such problems generalize the fundamental task of principal component analysis (PCA)…
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 $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$…
The authors in (Banjac et al., 2019) recently showed that the Douglas-Rachford algorithm provides certificates of infeasibility for a class of convex optimization problems. In particular, they showed that the difference between consecutive…
In this note, we focus on smooth nonconvex optimization problems that obey: (1) all local minimizers are also global; and (2) around any saddle point or local maximizer, the objective has a negative directional curvature. Concrete…
The Douglas-Rachford algorithm is a very popular splitting technique for finding a zero of the sum of two maximally monotone operators. However, the behaviour of the algorithm remains mysterious in the general inconsistent case, i.e., when…
In this paper we present two Douglas-Rachford inspired iteration schemes which can be applied directly to N-set convex feasibility problems in Hilbert space. Our main results are weak convergence of the methods to a point whose nearest…
We design a non-convex second-order optimization algorithm that is guaranteed to return an approximate local minimum in time which scales linearly in the underlying dimension and the number of training examples. The time complexity of our…
Many applications using large datasets require efficient methods for minimizing a proximable convex function subject to satisfying a set of linear constraints within a specified tolerance. For this task, we present a proximal projection…
We address the problem of finding a local solution to a nonconvex-nonconcave minmax optimization using Newton type methods, including interior-point ones. We modify the Hessian matrix of these methods such that, at each step, the modified…
Many large-scale and distributed optimization problems can be brought into a composite form in which the objective function is given by the sum of a smooth term and a nonsmooth regularizer. Such problems can be solved via a proximal…
Distributed optimization utilizes local computation and communication to realize a global aim of optimizing the sum of local objective functions. This article addresses a class of constrained distributed nonconvex optimization problems…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
In this paper, we study a parameterized Douglas-Rachford splitting method for a class of nonconvex optimization problem. A new merit function is constructed to establish the convergence of the whole sequence generated by the parameterized…
Proximal splitting algorithms for monotone inclusions (and convex optimization problems) in Hilbert spaces share the common feature to guarantee for the generated sequences in general weak convergence to a solution. In order to achieve…
We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…