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Temporal-Difference (TD) learning with nonlinear smooth function approximation for policy evaluation has achieved great success in modern reinforcement learning. It is shown that such a problem can be reformulated as a stochastic…
Bilevel optimization has gained prominence in various applications. In this study, we introduce a framework for solving bilevel optimization problems, where the variables in both the lower and upper levels are constrained on Riemannian…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
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…
Bilevel optimization has recently regained interest owing to its applications in emerging machine learning fields such as hyperparameter optimization, meta-learning, and reinforcement learning. Recent results have shown that simple…
Sampling-based optimization (SBO), like cross-entropy method and evolutionary algorithms, has achieved many successes in solving non-convex problems without gradients, yet its convergence is poorly understood. In this paper, we establish a…
In this paper, we consider the minimization of a nonsmooth nonconvex objective function $f(x)$ over a closed convex subset $\mathcal{X}$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, with additional nonsmooth nonconvex constraints $c(x) = 0$. We develop a unified…
In this paper, we propose an inexact block coordinate descent algorithm for large-scale nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems. At each iteration, a particular block variable is selected and updated by inexactly solving the original…
Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…
We introduce a generic scheme to solve nonconvex optimization problems using gradient-based algorithms originally designed for minimizing convex functions. Even though these methods may originally require convexity to operate, the proposed…
Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…
In this paper, we study multi-block min-max bilevel optimization problems, where the upper level is non-convex strongly-concave minimax objective and the lower level is a strongly convex objective, and there are multiple blocks of dual…
We introduce contextual stochastic bilevel optimization (CSBO) -- a stochastic bilevel optimization framework with the lower-level problem minimizing an expectation conditioned on some contextual information and the upper-level decision…
A novel multiscale consensus-based optimization (CBO) algorithm for solving bi- and tri-level optimization problems is introduced. Existing CBO techniques are generalized by the proposed method through the employment of multiple interacting…
This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…
Nonconvex-nonconcave minimax optimization has gained widespread interest over the last decade. However, most existing works focus on variants of gradient descent-ascent (GDA) algorithms, which are only applicable to smooth nonconvex-concave…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem,…
This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…
In this paper, we propose a double iteratively reweighted algorithm to solve nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems, where both the objectives and constraint functions are formulated by concave compositions to promote group-sparse…