Related papers: A first-order method for nonconvex-nonconcave mini…
Proximal gradient methods are a popular tool for the solution of structured, nonsmooth minimization problems. In this work, we investigate an extension of the former to general Banach spaces and provide worst-case convergence rates for,…
In this paper, we focus on the local convergence rate analysis of the proximal iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$ algorithms for solving $\ell_p$ regularization problems, which are widely applied for inducing sparse solutions. We show that if…
Stochastic nonconvex-concave min-max saddle point problems appear in many machine learning and control problems including distributionally robust optimization, generative adversarial networks, and adversarial learning. In this paper, we…
Simple bilevel problems are optimization problems in which we want to find an optimal solution to an inner problem that minimizes an outer objective function. Such problems appear in many machine learning and signal processing applications…
Min-max problems have broad applications in machine learning, including learning with non-decomposable loss and learning with robustness to data distribution. Convex-concave min-max problem is an active topic of research with efficient…
This paper considers distributed optimization for minimizing the average of local nonconvex cost functions, by using local information exchange over undirected communication networks. To reduce the required communication capacity, we…
In this paper, we consider a class of structured nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems, in which the objective function is formed by the sum of a possibly nonsmooth nonconvex function and a differentiable function whose gradient is…
Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic…
In this paper we study a nonconvex-strongly-concave constrained minimax problem. Specifically, we propose a first-order augmented Lagrangian method for solving it, whose subproblems are nonconvex-strongly-concave unconstrained minimax…
In this paper, we develop new first-order method for composite non-convex minimization problems with simple constraints and inexact oracle. The objective function is given as a sum of "`hard"', possibly non-convex part, and "`simple"'…
Cubic-regularized Newton's method (CR) is a popular algorithm that guarantees to produce a second-order stationary solution for solving nonconvex optimization problems. However, existing understandings of the convergence rate of CR are…
We study the linear convergence rates of the proximal gradient method for composite functions satisfying two classes of Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (PL) inequality: the PL inequality, the variant of PL inequality defined by the proximal map-based…
This paper studies the complexity for finding approximate stationary points of nonconvex-strongly-concave (NC-SC) smooth minimax problems, in both general and averaged smooth finite-sum settings. We establish nontrivial lower complexity…
In the development of first-order methods for smooth (resp., composite) convex optimization problems, where smooth functions with Lipschitz continuous gradients are minimized, the gradient (resp., gradient mapping) norm becomes a…
We initiate the study of nonsmooth optimization problems under bounded local subgradient variation, which postulates bounded difference between (sub)gradients in small local regions around points, in either average or maximum sense. The…
We consider the problem of global optimization of an unknown non-convex smooth function with zeroth-order feedback. In this setup, an algorithm is allowed to adaptively query the underlying function at different locations and receives noisy…
In this paper we develop a higher-order method for solving composite (non)convex minimization problems with smooth (non)convex functional constraints. At each iteration our method approximates the smooth part of the objective function and…
The classical Lojasiewicz inequality and its extensions for partial differential equation problems (Simon) and to o-minimal structures (Kurdyka) have a considerable impact on the analysis of gradient-like methods and related problems:…
We extend the traditional worst-case, minimax analysis of stochastic convex optimization by introducing a localized form of minimax complexity for individual functions. Our main result gives function-specific lower and upper bounds on the…
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…