Related papers: Analysis of Schedule-Free Nonconvex Optimization
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
In this paper, we introduce a new class of nonsmooth convex functions called SOS-convex semialgebraic functions extending the recently proposed notion of SOS-convex polynomials. This class of nonsmooth convex functions covers many common…
An adaptive regularization algorithm for unconstrained nonconvex optimization is presented in which the objective function is never evaluated, but only derivatives are used. This algorithm belongs to the class of adaptive regularization…
This paper studies a structured compound stochastic program (SP) involving multiple expectations coupled by nonconvex and nonsmooth functions. We present a successive convex-programming based sampling algorithm and establish its…
Iterative first-order methods such as gradient descent and its variants are widely used for solving optimization and machine learning problems. There has been recent interest in analytic or numerically efficient methods for computing…
We provide a control-theoretic perspective on optimal tensor algorithms for minimizing a convex function in a finite-dimensional Euclidean space. Given a function $\Phi: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ that is convex and twice…
Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time. Existing infinite-horizon methods, which often rely on discounted…
He and Yuan's prediction-correction framework [SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 50: 700-709, 2012] is able to provide convergent algorithms for solving separable convex optimization problems at a rate of $O(1/t)$ ($t$ represents iteration times) in…
Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem,…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function. These upper bounds are tight at the current estimate, and each iteration monotonically drives the objective…
We study a class of non-convex and non-smooth problems with \textit{rank} regularization to promote sparsity in optimal solution. We propose to apply the proximal gradient descent method to solve the problem and accelerate the process with…
This paper addresses the optimization problem of minimizing non-convex continuous functions, which is relevant in the context of high-dimensional machine learning applications characterized by over-parametrization. We analyze a randomized…
We prove lower bounds for higher-order methods in smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization. Our contribution is threefold: We first show that a deterministic algorithm cannot profit from the finite-sum structure of the objective, and that…
We focus on the problem of minimizing a convex function $f$ over a convex set $S$ given $T$ queries to a stochastic first order oracle. We argue that the complexity of convex minimization is only determined by the rate of growth of the…
Despite its important applications in Machine Learning, min-max optimization of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives remains elusive. Not only are there no known first-order methods converging even to approximate local min-max points, but the…
We consider the stochastic optimization problem with smooth but not necessarily convex objectives in the heavy-tailed noise regime, where the stochastic gradient's noise is assumed to have bounded $p$th moment ($p\in(1,2]$). Zhang et al.…
We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…
We propose a new first-order method for minimizing nonconvex functions with a Lipschitz continuous gradient and Hessian. The proposed method is an accelerated gradient descent with two restart mechanisms and finds a solution where the…
We study the complexity of optimizing nonsmooth nonconvex Lipschitz functions by producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points. Several recent works have presented randomized algorithms that produce such points using $\tilde…
We present a family of algorithms, called descent algorithms, for optimizing convex and non-convex functions. We also introduce a new first-order algorithm, called rescaled gradient descent (RGD), and show that RGD achieves a faster…