English
Related papers

Related papers: Non-smooth stochastic gradient descent using smoot…

200 papers

Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Cong Ma , Kaizheng Wang , Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen

In order to solve the minimization of a nonsmooth convex function, we design an inertial second-order dynamic algorithm, which is obtained by approximating the nonsmooth function by a class of smooth functions. By studying the asymptotic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-20 Xin Qu , Wei Bian

We investigate the stochastic optimization problem of minimizing population risk, where the loss defining the risk is assumed to be weakly convex. Compositions of Lipschitz convex functions with smooth maps are the primary examples of such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-19 Damek Davis , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy

In this paper, we present a stochastic gradient algorithm for minimizing a smooth objective function that is an expectation over noisy cost samples, and only the latter are observed for any given parameter. Our algorithm employs a gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-03 Akash Mondal , Prashanth L. A. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

In this paper we present an inexact zeroth-order method suitable for the solution nonsmooth and nonconvex stochastic composite optimization problems, in which the objective is split into a real-valued Lipschitz continuous stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-11 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysis Kalogerias

In this paper, we study a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. While restart strategies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-05 Xinming Wu , Zi Xu , Huiling Zhang

This work aims to solve a stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth composite optimization problem. Previous works on composite optimization problem requires the major part to satisfy Lipschitz smoothness or some relaxed smoothness conditions, which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-07 Ziyi Chen , Peiran Yu , Heng Huang

Various optimal gradient-based algorithms have been developed for smooth nonconvex optimization. However, many nonconvex machine learning problems do not belong to the class of smooth functions and therefore the existing algorithms are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-27 Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang , Zhaosong Lu

This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Anik Kumar Paul , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Da Li , Jingjing Wu , Qingrun Zhang

In nonsmooth optimization, a negative subgradient is not necessarily a descent direction, making the design of convergent descent methods based on zeroth-order and first-order information a challenging task. The well-studied bundle methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-13 Hanyang Li , Ying Cui

We study fundamental limits of first-order stochastic optimization in a range of nonconvex settings, including L-smooth functions satisfying Quasar-Convexity (QC), Quadratic Growth (QG), and Restricted Secant Inequalities (RSI). While the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-03 El Mehdi Saad , Wei-Cheng Lee , Francesco Orabona

Composite optimization problems, where the sum of a smooth and a merely lower semicontinuous function has to be minimized, are often tackled numerically by means of proximal gradient methods as soon as the lower semicontinuous part of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-05 Christian Kanzow , Patrick Mehlitz

Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-27 Ahmed Khaled , Peter Richtárik

This paper considers the nonconvex nonsmooth problem in which the objective function is Lipschitz continuous. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access stochastic function value evaluations with heavy-tailed noise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

We propose a stochastic optimization method for the minimization of the sum of three convex functions, one of which has Lipschitz continuous gradient as well as restricted strong convexity. Our approach is most suitable in the setting where…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-02-01 Alp Yurtsever , Bang Cong Vu , Volkan Cevher

This paper reviews the gradient sampling methodology for solving nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems. An intuitively straightforward gradient sampling algorithm is stated and its convergence properties are summarized. Throughout this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-01 James V. Burke , Frank E. Curtis , Adrian S. Lewis , Michael L. Overton , Lucas E. A. Simões

The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-19 Xiaoyu Wang , Sindri Magnússon , Mikael Johansson

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-08-26 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Elad Hazan

In this paper, we introduce a stochastic projected subgradient method for weakly convex (i.e., uniformly prox-regular) nonsmooth, nonconvex functions---a wide class of functions which includes the additive and convex composite classes. At a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-19 Damek Davis , Benjamin Grimmer