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We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-24 Sashank J. Reddi , Suvrit Sra , Barnabas Poczos , Alex Smola

Modern minimax problems, such as generative adversarial network and adversarial training, are often under a nonconvex-nonconcave setting, and developing an efficient method for such setting is of interest. Recently, two variants of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-22 Sucheol Lee , Donghwan Kim

In recent years, nonconvex minimax problems have attracted significant attention due to their broad applications in machine learning, including generative adversarial networks, robust optimization and adversarial training. Most existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-06 Yan Gao , Yongchao Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Arya Akhavan , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

Min-max saddle point games appear in a wide range of applications in machine leaning and signal processing. Despite their wide applicability, theoretical studies are mostly limited to the special convex-concave structure. While some recent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-19 Babak Barazandeh , Meisam Razaviyayn

In this paper, we prove new complexity bounds for zeroth-order methods in non-convex optimization with inexact observations of the objective function values. We use the Gaussian smoothing approach of Nesterov and Spokoiny [2015] and extend…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-14 Innokentiy Shibaev , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

Nonconvex-concave min-max problem arises in many machine learning applications including minimizing a pointwise maximum of a set of nonconvex functions and robust adversarial training of neural networks. A popular approach to solve this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-21 Jiawei Zhang , Peijun Xiao , Ruoyu Sun , Zhi-Quan Luo

In machine learning, nonconvex optimization problems with multiple local optimums are often encountered. Graduated Optimization Algorithm (GOA) is a popular heuristic method to obtain global optimums of nonconvex problems through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-11 Li Chen , Shuisheng Zhou , Zhuan Zhang

We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-01 Yiming Zhou , Wei Dai

In this study, we consider an optimization problem with uncertainty dependent on decision variables, which has recently attracted attention due to its importance in machine learning and pricing applications. In this problem, the gradient of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-31 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda

Classically, a mainstream approach for solving a convex-concave min-max problem is to instead solve the variational inequality problem arising from its first-order optimality conditions. Is it possible to solve min-max problems faster by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-06 Henry Shugart , Jason M. Altschuler

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-26 Yining Wang , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Aarti Singh

In multi-objective optimization, minimizing the worst objective can be preferable to minimizing the average objective, as this ensures improved fairness across objectives. Due to the non-smooth nature of the resultant min-max optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-07 Sangwoo Park , Stefan Vlaski , Lajos Hanzo

This paper studies first order methods for solving smooth minimax optimization problems $\min_x \max_y g(x,y)$ where $g(\cdot,\cdot)$ is smooth and $g(x,\cdot)$ is concave for each $x$. In terms of $g(\cdot,y)$, we consider two settings --…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-03 Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Prateek Jain , Praneeth Netrapalli , Sewoong Oh

Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function so that along the iterations the objective function decreases. Such a simple principle allows to solve a large…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-04 Ion Necoara , Daniela Lupu

We investigate a class of nonconvex optimization problems characterized by a feasible set consisting of level-bounded nonconvex regularizers, with a continuously differentiable objective. We propose a novel hybrid approach to tackle such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-28 Xiangyu Yang , Hao Wang , Yichen Zhu , Xiao Wang

In this paper, we focus on solving an important class of nonconvex optimization problems which includes many problems for example signal processing over a networked multi-agent system and distributed learning over networks. Motivated by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-25 Ehsan Kazemi , Liqiang Wang

Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Tengyu Ma

In this work, we focus on the study of stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order gradient information and uses only function evaluations. The problem of ZO optimization has emerged in many recent machine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-22 Pranay Sharma , Kaidi Xu , Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Xue Lin , Pramod K. Varshney

Min-max optimization problems involving nonconvex-nonconcave objectives have found important applications in adversarial training and other multi-agent learning settings. Yet, no known gradient descent-based method is guaranteed to converge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Constantinos Daskalakis , Noah Golowich , Stratis Skoulakis , Manolis Zampetakis