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We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
In this paper, we introduce a \textit{Bi-level OPTimization} (BiOPT) framework for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, where both can be nonsmooth. The BiOPT framework involves two levels of methodologies. At the upper level of…
Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…
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 explores numerical methods for solving a convex differentiable semi-infinite program. We introduce a primal-dual gradient method which performs three updates iteratively: a momentum gradient ascend step to update the constraint…
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
Bilevel optimization (BO) is useful for solving a variety of important machine learning problems including but not limited to hyperparameter optimization, meta-learning, continual learning, and reinforcement learning. Conventional BO…
Stochastic nonconvex minimax problems have attracted wide attention in machine learning, signal processing and many other fields in recent years. In this paper, we propose an accelerated first-order regularized momentum descent ascent…
This paper considers the simple bilevel optimization (SBO) problem, which minimizes a composite convex function over the optimal solution set of another composite convex minimization problem. We first show that this bilevel problem is…
We introduce in this paper an optimal first-order method that allows an easy and cheap evaluation of the local Lipschitz constant of the objective's gradient. This constant must ideally be chosen at every iteration as small as possible,…
In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…
In this paper, we consider multi-stage stochastic optimization problems with convex objectives and conic constraints at each stage. We present a new stochastic first-order method, namely the dynamic stochastic approximation (DSA) algorithm,…
In this paper, we propose a proximal gradient method and an accelerated proximal gradient method for solving composite optimization problems, where the objective function is the sum of a smooth and a convex, possibly nonsmooth, function. We…
Bilevel optimization is a hierarchical framework where an upper-level optimization problem is constrained by a lower-level problem, commonly used in machine learning applications such as hyperparameter optimization. Existing bilevel…
This paper introduces a novel Homogeneous Second-order Descent Ascent (HSDA) algorithm for nonconvex-strongly concave minimax optimization problems. At each iteration, HSDA uniquely computes a search direction by solving a homogenized…
Classical convergence analyses for optimization algorithms rely on the widely-adopted uniform smoothness assumption. However, recent experimental studies have demonstrated that many machine learning problems exhibit non-uniform smoothness,…
Two-level stochastic optimization formulations have become instrumental in a number of machine learning contexts such as continual learning, neural architecture search, adversarial learning, and hyperparameter tuning. Practical stochastic…
In this paper, we discuss the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: a smooth function plus a non-smooth function. Further, the smooth part can be expressed by the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and…
In recent years, a variety of gradient-based first-order methods have been developed to solve bi-level optimization problems for learning applications. However, theoretical guarantees of these existing approaches heavily rely on the…
Bilevel optimization problems consist of minimizing a value function whose evaluation depends on the solution of an inner optimization problem. These problems are typically tackled using first-order methods that require computing the…