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Large-scale constrained optimization problems are at the core of many tasks in control, signal processing, and machine learning. Notably, problems with functional constraints arise when, beyond a performance{\nobreakdash-}centric goal…
We develop a framework for convexifying a fairly general class of optimization problems. Under additional assumptions, we analyze the suboptimality of the solution to the convexified problem relative to the original nonconvex problem and…
This paper considers nonsmooth convex optimization with either a subgradient or proximal operator oracle. In both settings, we identify algorithms that achieve the recently introduced game-theoretic optimality notion for algorithms known as…
The optimization version of the cavity method for single instances, called Max-Sum, has been applied in the past to the Minimum Steiner Tree Problem on Graphs and variants. Max-Sum has been shown experimentally to give asymptotically…
A recent breakthrough in nonconvex optimization is the online-to-nonconvex conversion framework of [Cutkosky et al., 2023], which reformulates the task of finding an $\varepsilon$-first-order stationary point as an online learning problem.…
We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has…
Nonconvex optimization refers to the process of solving problems whose objective or constraints are nonconvex. Historically, this type of problems have been very difficult to solve to global optimality, with traditional solvers often…
The motivation for this paper stems from the desire to develop an adaptive sampling method for solving constrained optimization problems in which the objective function is stochastic and the constraints are deterministic. The method…
Modern minimax problems, such as generative adversarial network and adversarial training, are often under a nonconvex-nonconcave setting, and developing an efficient method for such setting is of interest. Recently, two variants of the…
We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…
The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is a key reference for inference in latent variable models; unfortunately, its computational cost is prohibitive in the large scale learning setting. In this paper, we propose an extension of the…
We develop a novel procedure for estimating the optimizer of general convex stochastic optimization problems of the form $\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}} \mathbb{E}[F(x,\xi)]$, when the given data is a finite independent sample selected according to…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
This paper considers the analysis of continuous time gradient-based optimization algorithms through the lens of nonlinear contraction theory. It demonstrates that in the case of a time-invariant objective, most elementary results on…
Smooth convex minimization over the unit trace-norm ball is an important optimization problem in machine learning, signal processing, statistics and other fields, that underlies many tasks in which one wishes to recover a low-rank matrix…
Using convex combination and linesearch techniques, we introduce a novel primal-dual algorithm for solving structured convex-concave saddle point problems with a generic smooth nonbilinear coupling term. Our adaptive linesearch strategy…
Decision trees and randomized forests are widely used in computer vision and machine learning. Standard algorithms for decision tree induction optimize the split functions one node at a time according to some splitting criteria. This greedy…
We propose a stochastic gradient framework for solving stochastic composite convex optimization problems with (possibly) infinite number of linear inclusion constraints that need to be satisfied almost surely. We use smoothing and homotopy…
This paper studies the stochastic nonconvex-strongly-concave minimax optimization over a multi-agent network. We propose an efficient algorithm, called Decentralized Recursive gradient descEnt Ascent Method (DREAM), which achieves the…
Stochastic Approximation has been a prominent set of tools for solving problems with noise and uncertainty. Increasingly, it becomes important to solve optimization problems wherein there is noise in both a set of constraints that a…