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This paper investigates accelerating the convergence of distributed optimization algorithms on non-convex problems. We propose a distributed primal-dual stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) equipped with "powerball" method to accelerate. We…

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of three convex functions: i) a smooth function $f$ in the form of an expectation or a finite average, ii) a non-smooth function $g$ in the form of a finite average of proximable functions…

Virtually all state-of-the-art methods for training supervised machine learning models are variants of SGD enhanced with a number of additional tricks, such as minibatching, momentum, and adaptive stepsizes. One of the tricks that works so…

This paper tackles the unconstrained minimization of a class of nonsmooth and nonconvex functions that can be written as finite max-functions. A gradient and function-based sampling method is proposed which, under special circumstances,…

Optimization objectives in the form of a sum of intractable expectations are rising in importance (e.g., diffusion models, variational autoencoders, and many more), a setting also known as "finite sum with infinite data." For these…

In this paper, we examine the convergence of mirror descent in a class of stochastic optimization problems that are not necessarily convex (or even quasi-convex), and which we call variationally coherent. Since the standard technique of…

Matrix completion has attracted much interest in the past decade in machine learning and computer vision. For low-rank promotion in matrix completion, the nuclear norm penalty is convenient due to its convexity but has a bias problem.…

In this work, we consider minimizing the average of a very large number of smooth and possibly non-convex functions, and we focus on two widely used minibatch frameworks to tackle this optimization problem: Incremental Gradient (IG) and…

Novel coordinate descent (CD) methods are proposed for minimizing nonconvex functions consisting of three terms: (i) a continuously differentiable term, (ii) a simple convex term, and (iii) a concave and continuous term. First, by extending…

We study stochastic algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems with a convex yet possibly nonsmooth regularizer, which find wide applications in many practical machine learning applications. However, compared to asynchronous…

In this note we give a simple proof for the convergence of stochastic gradient (SGD) methods on $\mu$-convex functions under a (milder than standard) $L$-smoothness assumption. We show that for carefully chosen stepsizes SGD converges after…

$L_0$-smoothness, which has been pivotal to advancing decentralized optimization theory, is often fairly restrictive for modern tasks like deep learning. The recent advent of relaxed $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness condition enables improved…

Regularization is a widely recognized technique in mathematical optimization. It can be used to smooth out objective functions, refine the feasible solution set, or prevent overfitting in machine learning models. Due to its simplicity and…

We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…

The stochastic composition optimization proposed recently by Wang et al. [2014] minimizes the objective with the compositional expectation form: $\min_x~(\mathbb{E}_iF_i \circ \mathbb{E}_j G_j)(x).$ It summarizes many important applications…

We present a new algorithm for solving optimization problems with objective functions that are the sum of a smooth function and a (potentially) nonsmooth regularization function, and nonlinear equality constraints. The algorithm may be…

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,…

Successive quadratic approximations, or second-order proximal methods, are useful for minimizing functions that are a sum of a smooth part and a convex, possibly nonsmooth part that promotes regularization. Most analyses of iteration…

This paper is concerned with multi-agent optimization problem. A distributed randomized gradient-free mirror descent (DRGFMD) method is developed by introducing a randomized gradient-free oracle in the mirror descent scheme where the…

In this paper, we consider a class of finite-sum convex optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of $m$ ($\ge 1$) smooth components together with some other relatively simple terms. We first introduce a…