Related papers: Second-order methods for provably escaping strict …
We analyze the behavior of randomized coordinate gradient descent for nonconvex optimization, proving that under standard assumptions, the iterates almost surely escape strict saddle points. By formulating the method as a nonlinear random…
This paper proposes low-complexity algorithms for finding approximate second-order stationary points (SOSPs) of problems with smooth non-convex objective and linear constraints. While finding (approximate) SOSPs is computationally…
We present a non-conforming least squares method for approximating solutions of second order elliptic problems with discontinuous coefficients. The method is based on a general Saddle Point Least Squares (SPLS) method introduced in previous…
In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…
"Classical" First Order (FO) algorithms of convex optimization, such as Mirror Descent algorithm or Nesterov's optimal algorithm of smooth convex optimization, are well known to have optimal (theoretical) complexity estimates which do not…
We revisit the smooth convex-concave bilinearly-coupled saddle-point problem of the form $\min_x\max_y f(x) + \langle y,\mathbf{B} x\rangle - g(y)$. In the highly specific case where each of the functions $f(x)$ and $g(y)$ is either affine…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
We consider empirical risk minimization of linear predictors with convex loss functions. Such problems can be reformulated as convex-concave saddle point problems, and thus are well suitable for primal-dual first-order algorithms. However,…
We consider non-smooth saddle point optimization problems. To solve these problems, we propose a zeroth-order method under bounded or Lipschitz continuous noise, possible adversarial. In contrast to the state-of-the-art algorithms, our…
In this paper, we propose a Dimension-Reduced Second-Order Method (DRSOM) for convex and nonconvex (unconstrained) optimization. Under a trust-region-like framework, our method preserves the convergence of the second-order method while…
This paper proposes and develops new Newton-type methods to solve structured nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems with justifying their fast local and global convergence by means of advanced tools of variational analysis and…
A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…
In this paper we analyze several new methods for solving nonconvex optimization problems with the objective function formed as a sum of two terms: one is nonconvex and smooth, and another is convex but simple and its structure is known.…
We consider non-convex stochastic optimization using first-order algorithms for which the gradient estimates may have heavy tails. We show that a combination of gradient clipping, momentum, and normalized gradient descent yields convergence…
We develop a trust-region method for efficiently minimizing the sum of a smooth function, a nonsmooth convex function, and the composition of a finite-valued support function with a smooth function. Optimization problems with this structure…
In this paper, we propose a variance-reduced primal-dual algorithm with Bregman distance for solving convex-concave saddle-point problems with finite-sum structure and nonbilinear coupling function. This type of problems typically arises in…
We propose several new nonsmooth Newton methods for solving convex composite optimization problems with polyhedral regularizers, while avoiding the computation of complicated second-order information on these functions. Under the…
Physics-informed machine learning and inverse modeling require the solution of ill-conditioned non-convex optimization problems. First-order methods, such as SGD and ADAM, and quasi-Newton methods, such as BFGS and L-BFGS, have been applied…
We provide a framework for computing the exact worst-case performance of any algorithm belonging to a broad class of oracle-based first-order methods for composite convex optimization, including those performing explicit, projected,…
We analyze stochastic gradient descent for optimizing non-convex functions. In many cases for non-convex functions the goal is to find a reasonable local minimum, and the main concern is that gradient updates are trapped in saddle points.…