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Classical analysis of convex and non-convex optimization methods often requires the Lipshitzness of the gradient, which limits the analysis to functions bounded by quadratics. Recent work relaxed this requirement to a non-uniform smoothness…
In this work, we consider the distributed optimization of non-smooth convex functions using a network of computing units. We investigate this problem under two regularity assumptions: (1) the Lipschitz continuity of the global objective…
Classical results show that gradient descent converges linearly to minimizers of smooth strongly convex functions. A natural question is whether there exists a locally nearly linearly convergent method for nonsmooth functions with quadratic…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
This work considers minimizing a sum of convex functions, each with potentially different structure ranging from nonsmooth to smooth, Lipschitz to non-Lipschitz. Nesterov's universal fast gradient method provides an optimal black-box…
Quasar-convex functions form a broad nonconvex class with applications to linear dynamical systems, generalized linear models, and Riemannian optimization, among others. Current nearly optimal algorithms work only in affine spaces due to…
Modern data science applications demand solving large-scale optimization problems. The prevalent approaches are first-order methods, valued for their scalability. These methods are implemented to tackle highly irregular problems where…
In the last several years, the intimate connection between convex optimization and learning problems, in both statistical and sequential frameworks, has shifted the focus of algorithmic machine learning to examine this interplay. In…
Invex programs are a special kind of non-convex problems which attain global minima at every stationary point. While classical first-order gradient descent methods can solve them, they converge very slowly. In this paper, we propose new…
We develop algorithms for the optimization of convex objectives that have H\"older continuous $q$-th derivatives by using a $q$-th order oracle, for any $q \geq 1$. Our algorithms work for general norms under mild conditions, including the…
We propose a new family of adaptive first-order methods for a class of convex minimization problems that may fail to be Lipschitz continuous or smooth in the standard sense. Specifically, motivated by a recent flurry of activity on…
Robust optimization (RO) is one of the key paradigms for solving optimization problems affected by uncertainty. Two principal approaches for RO, the robust counterpart method and the adversarial approach, potentially lead to excessively…
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…
In a recent paper, Bubeck, Lee, and Singh introduced a new first order method for minimizing smooth strongly convex functions. Their geometric descent algorithm, largely inspired by the ellipsoid method, enjoys the optimal linear rate of…
We study the robustness of accelerated first-order algorithms to stochastic uncertainties in gradient evaluation. Specifically, for unconstrained, smooth, strongly convex optimization problems, we examine the mean-squared error in the…
In this paper, we propose a multilevel stochastic framework for the solution of nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. The proposed approach uses random regularized first-order models that exploit an available hierarchical…
There has been much recent interest in finding unconstrained local minima of smooth functions, due in part of the prevalence of such problems in machine learning and robust statistics. A particular focus is algorithms with good complexity…
We provide improved convergence rates for various \emph{non-smooth} optimization problems via higher-order accelerated methods. In the case of $\ell_\infty$ regression, we achieves an $O(\epsilon^{-4/5})$ iteration complexity, breaking the…
This paper studies first-order algorithms for solving fully composite optimization problems over convex and compact sets. We leverage the structure of the objective by handling its differentiable and non-differentiable components…
This paper addresses a class of nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization problems defined on complete Riemannian manifolds. The objective function has a composite structure, combining convex, differentiable, and lower semicontinuous terms,…