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Related papers: Zeroth-Order Methods for Stochastic Nonconvex Nons…

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It is well-known that given a smooth, bounded-from-below, and possibly nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-28 Guy Kornowski , Ohad Shamir

A fully stochastic second-order adaptive-regularization method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization is presented which never computes the objective-function value, but yet achieves the optimal $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ complexity…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-22 Serge Gratton , Sadok Jerad , Philippe L. Toint

We introduce the concept of strong high-order approximate minimizers for nonconvex optimization problems. These apply in both standard smooth and composite non-smooth settings, and additionally allow convex or inexpensive constraints. An…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-30 Coralia Cartis , Nick Gould , Philippe L. Toint

We consider stochastic convex optimization with a strongly convex (but not necessarily smooth) objective. We give an algorithm which performs only gradient updates with optimal rate of convergence.

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2010-06-15 Elad Hazan , Satyen Kale

We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-09 Xinran Zheng , Tara Javidi , Behrouz Touri

This paper studies first-order algorithms for solving fully composite optimization problems over convex and compact sets. We leverage the structure of the objective by handling its differentiable and non-differentiable components…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-13 Maria-Luiza Vladarean , Nikita Doikov , Martin Jaggi , Nicolas Flammarion

This chapter is devoted to the black-box subgradient algorithms with the minimal requirements for the storage of auxiliary results, which are necessary to execute these algorithms. It starts with the original result of N.Z. Shor which open…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-06 Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov , Evgeni Nurminsky , Fedor Stonyakin

In this paper, we consider non-smooth stochastic convex optimization with two function evaluations per round under infinite noise variance. In the classical setting when noise has finite variance, an optimal algorithm, built upon the…

We propose two new alternating direction methods to solve "fully" nonsmooth constrained convex problems. Our algorithms have the best known worst-case iteration-complexity guarantee under mild assumptions for both the objective residual and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-01-16 Quoc Tran-Dinh , Volkan Cevher

This paper is devoted to a new modification of a recently proposed adaptive stochastic mirror descent algorithm for constrained convex optimization problems in the case of several convex functional constraints. Algorithms, standard and its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-22 Mohammad S. Alkousa

We present two easy-to-implement gradient-free/zeroth-order methods to optimize a stochastic non-smooth function accessible only via a black-box. The methods are built upon efficient first-order methods in the heavy-tailed case, i.e., when…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-25 Nikita Kornilov , Alexander Gasnikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Darina Dvinskikh

We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function for which derivatives are unavailable, and a convex, nonsmooth function with easy-to-evaluate proximal operator. Of particular focus is the case where the smooth…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-23 Yanjun Liu , Kevin H. Lam , Lindon Roberts

In this paper, we introduce various mechanisms to obtain accelerated first-order stochastic optimization algorithms when the objective function is convex or strongly convex. Specifically, we extend the Catalyst approach originally designed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-10 Andrei Kulunchakov , Julien Mairal

Finite-sum Coupled Compositional Optimization (FCCO), characterized by its coupled compositional objective structure, emerges as an important optimization paradigm for addressing a wide range of machine learning problems. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Xingyu Chen , Bokun Wang , Ming Yang , Qihang Lin , Tianbao Yang

This paper presents a convex optimization-based method for finding the globally optimal solutions of a class of mixed-integer non-convex optimal control problems. We consider problems that are non-convex in the input norm, which is a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-20 Danylo Malyuta , Michael Szmuk , Behcet Acikmese

We extend the standard notion of self-concordance to non-convex optimization and develop a family of second-order algorithms with global convergence guarantees. In particular, two function classes -- \textit{weakly self-concordant}…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Donald Goldfarb , Lexiao Lai , Tianyi Lin , Jiayu Zhang

We introduce a new approach to develop stochastic optimization algorithms for a class of stochastic composite and possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The main idea is to combine two stochastic estimators to create a new hybrid one. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-05 Quoc Tran-Dinh , Nhan H. Pham , Dzung T. Phan , Lam M. Nguyen

We exploit analogies between first-order algorithms for constrained optimization and non-smooth dynamical systems to design a new class of accelerated first-order algorithms for constrained optimization. Unlike Frank-Wolfe or projected…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-02 Michael Muehlebach , Michael I. Jordan

Finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point of a nonconvex function with a Lipschitz continuous Hessian is a central problem in optimization. Regularized Newton methods are a classical tool and have been studied extensively, yet they still face…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-03 Yuhao Zhou , Jintao Xu , Bingrui Li , Chenglong Bao , Chao Ding , Jun Zhu

This paper studies a stochastic algorithm for linearly constrained nonconvex optimization, where the objective function is smooth but only unbiased stochastic gradients with bounded variance are available. We propose a momentum-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-16 Chenyang Qiu , Mihitha Maithripala , Zongli Lin