Related papers: A first-order method for nonconvex-nonconcave mini…
This paper studies simple bilevel problems, where a convex upper-level function is minimized over the optimal solutions of a convex lower-level problem. We first show the fundamental difficulty of simple bilevel problems, that the…
In this paper, we study a class of fractional optimization problems, in which the numerator of the objective is the sum of a convex function and a differentiable function with a Lipschitz continuous gradient, while the denominator is a…
In this paper we propose two proximal gradient algorithms for fractional programming problems in real Hilbert spaces, where the numerator is a proper, convex and lower semicontinuous function and the denominator is a smooth function, either…
We consider the nonconvex minimization problem, with quartic objective function, that arises in the exact recovery of a configuration matrix $P\in \R^{nd}$ of $n$ points when a Euclidean distance matrix, \EDMp, is given with embedding…
This work extends the iterative framework proposed by Attouch et al. (in Math. Program. 137: 91-129, 2013) for minimizing a nonconvex and nonsmooth function $\Phi$ so that the generated sequence possesses a Q-superlinear convergence rate.…
The main challenge of nonconvex optimization is to find a global optimum, or at least to avoid ``bad'' local minima and meaningless stationary points. We study here the extent to which algorithms, as opposed to optimization models and…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-level compositional optimization, where the objective function is a composition of multiple smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Existing methods for solving this problem…
This paper studies the complexity of finding approximate stationary points for the smooth nonconvex-strongly-concave (NC-SC) saddle point problem: $\min_x\max_yf(x,y)$. Under the standard first-order smoothness conditions where $f$ is…
We incorporate an iteratively reweighted strategy in the manifold proximal point algorithm (ManPPA) in [12] to solve an enhanced sparsity inducing model for identifying sparse yet nonzero vectors in a given subspace. We establish the global…
Stochastic smooth nonconvex minimax problems are prevalent in machine learning, e.g., GAN training, fair classification, and distributionally robust learning. Stochastic gradient descent ascent (GDA)-type methods are popular in practice due…
This work proposes an implementable proximal-type method for a broad class of optimization problems involving nonsmooth and nonconvex objective and constraint functions. In contrast to existing methods that rely on an ad hoc model…
Potential functions in highly pertinent applications, such as deep learning in over-parameterized regime, are empirically observed to admit non-isolated minima. To understand the convergence behavior of stochastic dynamics in such…
We focus on constrained, $L$-smooth, potentially stochastic and nonconvex-nonconcave min-max problems either satisfying $\rho$-cohypomonotonicity or admitting a solution to the $\rho$-weakly Minty Variational Inequality (MVI), where larger…
We study a generic class of decentralized algorithms in which $N$ agents jointly optimize the non-convex objective $f(u):=1/N\sum_{i=1}^{N}f_i(u)$, while only communicating with their neighbors. This class of problems has become popular in…
We study the problem of finding approximate first-order stationary points in optimization problems of the form $\min_{x \in X} \max_{y \in Y} f(x,y)$, where the sets $X,Y$ are convex and $Y$ is compact. The objective function $f$ is smooth,…
We propose a single time-scale stochastic subgradient method for constrained optimization of a composition of several nonsmooth and nonconvex functions. The functions are assumed to be locally Lipschitz and differentiable in a generalized…
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…
The stochastic proximal gradient method is a powerful generalization of the widely used stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and has found numerous applications in Machine Learning. However, it is notoriously known that this method…
Minimax optimization has become a central tool in machine learning with applications in robust optimization, reinforcement learning, GANs, etc. These applications are often nonconvex-nonconcave, but the existing theory is unable to identify…
A large number of problems in optimization, machine learning, signal processing can be effectively addressed by suitable semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations. Unfortunately, generic SDP solvers hardly scale beyond instances with a few…