Related papers: Zeroth-Order Methods for Stochastic Nonconvex Nons…
This paper considers stochastic first-order algorithms for convex-concave minimax problems of the form $\min_{\bf x}\max_{\bf y}f(\bf x, \bf y)$, where $f$ can be presented by the average of $n$ individual components which are $L$-average…
This note studies numerical methods for solving compositional optimization problems, where the inner function is smooth, and the outer function is Lipschitz continuous, non-smooth, and non-convex but exhibits one of two special structures…
This paper investigates the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem of minimizing a global cost function formed by the summation of $n$ local cost functions. We solve such a problem by involving zeroth-order (ZO) information…
This paper proposes a novel first-order algorithm that solves composite nonsmooth and stochastic convex optimization problem with function constraints. Most of the works in the literature provide convergence rate guarantees on the…
In this paper we propose third-order methods for composite convex optimization problems in which the smooth part is a three-times continuously differentiable function with Lipschitz continuous third-order derivatives. The methods are…
Composition optimization is widely-applied in nonconvex machine learning. Various advanced stochastic algorithms that adopt momentum and variance reduction techniques have been developed for composition optimization. However, these…
We focus on decentralized stochastic non-convex optimization, where $n$ agents work together to optimize a composite objective function which is a sum of a smooth term and a non-smooth convex term. To solve this problem, we propose two…
In this paper, we propose an inexact proximal Newton-type method for nonconvex composite problems. We establish the global convergence rate of the order $\mathcal{O}(k^{-1/2})$ in terms of the minimal norm of the KKT residual mapping and…
In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of nonsmooth and convex functions. Such problems often arise in typical machine learning problems as empirical risk minimization, but are computationally…
To solve convex optimization problems with a noisy gradient input, we analyze the global behavior of subgradient-like flows under stochastic errors. The objective function is composite, being equal to the sum of two convex functions, one…
In this paper, we propose two novel non-stationary first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems. Unlike existing primal-dual schemes where the parameters are often fixed, our methods use…
This paper proposes low-complexity algorithms for finding approximate second-order stationary points (SOSPs) of problems with smooth non-convex objective and linear constraints. While finding (approximate) SOSPs is computationally…
It is well-known that given a bounded, smooth nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (where the gradient norm is less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ iterations. However,…
In this paper, we study and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for solving bilvel problems, when neither the upper/lower objective values, nor their unbiased gradient estimates are available. In particular, exploiting…
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 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…
This study introduces two second-order methods designed to provably avoid saddle points in composite nonconvex optimization problems: (i) a nonsmooth trust-region method and (ii) a curvilinear linesearch method. These developments are…
We report a practical finite-time algorithmic scheme to compute approximately stationary points for nonconvex nonsmooth Lipschitz functions. In particular, we are interested in two kinds of approximate stationarity notions for nonconvex…
We consider a class of nonconvex nonsmooth multicomposite optimization problems where the objective function consists of a Tikhonov regularizer and a composition of multiple nonconvex nonsmooth component functions. Such optimization…
In this paper, we consider a broad class of nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems, where one objective component is a nonsmooth weakly convex function composed with a linear operator. By integrating variable smoothing techniques…