Related papers: Optimal Smoothed Analysis of the Simplex Method
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization with ordinal feedback has emerged as a fundamental problem in modern machine learning systems, particularly in human-in-the-loop settings such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference…
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…
In this paper we prove the first result of Nekhoroshev stability for steep Hamiltonians in H\"older class. Our new approach combines the classical theory of normal forms in analytic category with an improved smoothing procedure to…
Stochastic Proximal Gradient (SPG) methods have been widely used for solving optimization problems with a simple (possibly non-smooth) regularizer in machine learning and statistics. However, to the best of our knowledge no non-asymptotic…
Differentially private (DP) stochastic convex optimization (SCO) is a fundamental problem, where the goal is to approximately minimize the population risk with respect to a convex loss function, given a dataset of $n$ i.i.d. samples from a…
We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…
We obtain a new lower bound on the information-based complexity of first-order minimization of smooth and convex functions. We show that the bound matches the worst-case performance of the recently introduced Optimized Gradient Method,…
We develop and analyze stochastic optimization algorithms for problems in which the expected loss is strongly convex, and the optimum is (approximately) sparse. Previous approaches are able to exploit only one of these two structures,…
In this paper, we provide novel optimal (or near optimal) convergence rates for a clipped version of the stochastic subgradient method. We consider nonsmooth convex problems over possibly unbounded domains, under heavy-tailed noise that…
Time series visualization of streaming telemetry (i.e., charting of key metrics such as server load over time) is increasingly prevalent in modern data platforms and applications. However, many existing systems simply plot the raw data…
Leveraging algorithmic stability to derive sharp generalization bounds is a classic and powerful approach in learning theory. Since Vapnik and Chervonenkis [1974] first formalized the idea for analyzing SVMs, it has been utilized to study…
Stochastic compositional optimization arises in many important machine learning tasks such as value function evaluation in reinforcement learning and portfolio management. The objective function is the composition of two expectations of…
A strategy is proposed for characterizing the worst-case performance of algorithms for solving nonconvex smooth optimization problems. Contemporary analyses characterize worst-case performance by providing, under certain assumptions on an…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
We propose a method for zeroth order stochastic convex optimization that attains the suboptimality rate of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^{7}T^{-1/2})$ after $T$ queries for a convex bounded function $f:{\mathbb R}^n\to{\mathbb R}$. The method is…
Gradient-based algorithms have shown great promise in solving large (two-player) zero-sum games. However, their success has been mostly confined to the low-precision regime since the number of iterations grows polynomially in $1/\epsilon$,…
This paper generalizes the optimized gradient method (OGM) that achieves the optimal worst-case cost function bound of first-order methods for smooth convex minimization. Specifically, this paper studies a generalized formulation of OGM and…
Any classifier can be "smoothed out" under Gaussian noise to build a new classifier that is provably robust to $\ell_2$-adversarial perturbations, viz., by averaging its predictions over the noise via randomized smoothing. Under the…
Large-scale constrained optimization problems are at the core of many tasks in control, signal processing, and machine learning. Notably, problems with functional constraints arise when, beyond a performance{\nobreakdash-}centric goal…
To analyze the worst-case running time of branching algorithms, the majority of work in exponential time algorithms focuses on designing complicated branching rules over developing better analysis methods for simple algorithms. In the…