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The proximal bundle method (PBM) is a powerful and widely used approach for minimizing nonsmooth convex functions. However, for smooth objectives, its best-known convergence rate remains suboptimal, and whether PBM can be accelerated…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Feng-Yi Liao , Thomas Madden , Yang Zheng

We propose efficient methods for solving stochastic simple bilevel optimization problems with convex inner levels, where the goal is to minimize an outer stochastic objective function subject to the solution set of an inner stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-25 Khanh-Hung Giang-Tran , Soroosh Shafiee , Nam Ho-Nguyen

Stochastic composition optimization draws much attention recently and has been successful in many emerging applications of machine learning, statistical analysis, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we focus on the composition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Zhouyuan Huo , Bin Gu , Ji Liu , Heng Huang

Stochastic gradient methods are scalable for solving large-scale optimization problems that involve empirical expectations of loss functions. Existing results mainly apply to optimization problems where the objectives are one- or two-level…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-01-15 Shuoguang Yang , Mengdi Wang , Ethan X. Fang

Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-09-11 Julien Mairal

Stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints have a broad range of applications in intelligent transportation, cyber-security, and smart grids. In this paper, first, we propose an inexact-proximal accelerated…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-08 Morteza Boroun , Afrooz Jalilzadeh

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-27 Michael R. Metel , Akiko Takeda

This paper investigates a class of stochastic bilevel optimization problems where the upper-level function is nonconvex with potentially unbounded smoothness and the lower-level problem is strongly convex. These problems have significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Xiaochuan Gong , Jie Hao , Mingrui Liu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-17 Vladimir Norkin , Alois Pichler , Anton Kozyriev

In this paper, we consider constrained optimization problems with convex, smooth objective and constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called the Stochastic Moving Ball Approximation (SMBA) method, to solve this class…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-03 Nitesh Kumar Singh , Ion Necoara

In this paper, we propose a proximal gradient method and an accelerated proximal gradient method for solving composite optimization problems, where the objective function is the sum of a smooth and a convex, possibly nonsmooth, function. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-22 Raghu Bollapragada , Shagun Gupta

Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2017-12-12 Yang Yang , Gesualdo Scutari , Daniel P. Palomar , Marius Pesavento

This paper delves into the realm of stochastic optimization for compositional minimax optimization - a pivotal challenge across various machine learning domains, including deep AUC and reinforcement learning policy evaluation. Despite its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Jin Liu , Xiaokang Pan , Junwen Duan , Hongdong Li , Youqi Li , Zhe Qu

Multi-time-scale stochastic approximation is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of a set of $N$ coupled operators given their noisy samples. It has been observed that due to the coupling between the decision variables and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-13 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan

In this paper, we study stochastic optimization of areas under precision-recall curves (AUPRC), which is widely used for combating imbalanced classification tasks. Although a few methods have been proposed for maximizing AUPRC, stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Guanghui Wang , Ming Yang , Lijun Zhang , Tianbao Yang

Two new stochastic variance-reduced algorithms named SARAH and SPIDER have been recently proposed, and SPIDER has been shown to achieve a near-optimal gradient oracle complexity for nonconvex optimization. However, the theoretical advantage…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-17 Yi Zhou , Zhe Wang , Kaiyi Ji , Yingbin Liang , Vahid Tarokh

It is widely recognized in modern machine learning practice that access to a diverse set of tasks can enhance performance across those tasks. This observation suggests that, unlike in general multi-objective optimization, the objectives in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Ben Kretzu , Karen Ullrich , Yonathan Efroni

We propose a novel stochastic optimization algorithm called STOchastic Recursive Momentum for Compositional (STORM-Compositional) optimization that minimizes the composition of expectations of two stochastic functions, the latter being an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-09 Huizhuo Yuan , Wenqing Hu

Hierarchical optimization refers to problems with interdependent decision variables and objectives, such as minimax and bilevel formulations. While various algorithms have been proposed, existing methods and analyses lack adaptivity in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xiaochuan Gong , Jie Hao , Mingrui Liu

Traditional algorithms for stochastic optimization require projecting the solution at each iteration into a given domain to ensure its feasibility. When facing complex domains, such as positive semi-definite cones, the projection operation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-04-03 Lijun Zhang , Tianbao Yang , Rong Jin , Xiaofei He