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Shuffling-type gradient methods are favored in practice for their simplicity and rapid empirical performance. Despite extensive development of convergence guarantees under various assumptions in recent years, most require the Lipschitz…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Qi He , Peiran Yu , Ziyi Chen , Heng Huang

Consider composite nonconvex optimization problems where the objective function consists of a smooth nonconvex term (with Lipschitz-continuous gradient) and a convex (possibly nonsmooth) term. Existing parameter-free methods for such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-08 Zilong Ye , Shiqian Ma , Junfeng Yang , Danqing Zhou

We study first-order methods with preconditioning for solving structured nonlinear convex optimization problems. We propose a new family of preconditioners generated by symmetric polynomials. They provide first-order optimization methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-31 Nikita Doikov , Anton Rodomanov

In a series of papers \cite{LSJR16, PP17, LPP}, it was established that some of the most commonly used first order methods almost surely (under random initializations) and with step-size being small enough, avoid strict saddle points, as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Ioannis Panageas , Georgios Piliouras , Xiao Wang

We propose a primal-dual smoothing framework for finding a near-stationary point of a class of non-smooth non-convex optimization problems with max-structure. We analyze the primal and dual gradient complexities of the framework via two…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-19 Renbo Zhao

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

Decentralized optimization has become a fundamental tool for large-scale learning systems; however, most existing methods rely on the classical Lipschitz smoothness assumption, which is often violated in problems with rapidly varying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-08 Yanan Bo , Yongqiang Wang

This paper studies a novel algorithm for nonconvex composite minimization which can be interpreted in terms of dual space nonlinear preconditioning for the classical proximal gradient method. The proposed scheme can be applied to additive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-24 Emanuel Laude , Panagiotis Patrinos

Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-04-01 Stefan Vlaski , Ali H. Sayed

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

Sign-based stochastic methods have gained attention due to their ability to achieve robust performance despite using only the sign information for parameter updates. However, the current convergence analysis of sign-based methods relies on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Tao Sun , Congliang Chen , Peng Qiao , Li Shen , Xinwang Liu , Dongsheng Li

In this paper we propose several adaptive gradient methods for stochastic optimization. Unlike AdaGrad-type of methods, our algorithms are based on Armijo-type line search and they simultaneously adapt to the unknown Lipschitz constant of…

A central challenge to using first-order methods for optimizing nonconvex problems is the presence of saddle points. First-order methods often get stuck at saddle points, greatly deteriorating their performance. Typically, to escape from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-09-06 Sashank J Reddi , Manzil Zaheer , Suvrit Sra , Barnabas Poczos , Francis Bach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Alexander J Smola

This book is devoted to finite-dimensional problems of non-convex non-smooth optimization and numerical methods for their solution. The problem of nonconvexity is studied in the book on two main models of nonconvex dependencies: these are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-18 V. S. Mikhalevich , A. M. Gupal , V. I. Norkin

Linear optimization is many times algorithmically simpler than non-linear convex optimization. Linear optimization over matroid polytopes, matching polytopes and path polytopes are example of problems for which we have simple and efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-08-17 Dan Garber , Elad Hazan

While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-19 Peng Xu , Farbod Roosta-Khorasani , Michael W. Mahoney

We present an adaptive step-size method, which does not include line-search techniques, for solving a wide class of nonconvex multiobjective programming problems on an unbounded constraint set. We also prove convergence of a general…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-12 Nguyen Anh Minh , Le Dung Muu , Tran Ngoc Thang

Loss functions with a large number of saddle points are one of the major obstacles for training modern machine learning models efficiently. First-order methods such as gradient descent are usually the methods of choice for training machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-29 Lisa Maria Kreusser , Stanley J. Osher , Bao Wang

We study a class of optimization problems on Riemannian manifolds, where the objective function consists of a smooth term and quasi-norm type penalties with exponent $p \in (0, 1]$. The essential difficulty lies in the fact that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-21 Lei Wang , Xiaojun Chen

In this paper, we propose a primal-dual algorithm with a novel momentum term using the partial gradients of the coupling function that can be viewed as a generalization of the method proposed by Chambolle and Pock in 2016 to solve saddle…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-22 Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani , Necdet Serhat Aybat