Related papers: Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Con…
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…
Numerical evaluations have definitively shown that, for deep learning optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent, momentum, and adaptive methods, the number of steps needed to train a deep neural network halves for each doubling of the…
It is well known that bilevel optimization problems are hard to solve both in theory and practice. In this paper, we highlight a further computational difficulty when it comes to solving bilevel problems with continuous but nonconvex lower…
Algorithmic reproducibility measures the deviation in outputs of machine learning algorithms upon minor changes in the training process. Previous work suggests that first-order methods would need to trade-off convergence rate (gradient…
In this paper, we present convergence guarantees for a modified trust-region method designed for minimizing objective functions whose value and gradient and Hessian estimates are computed with noise. These estimates are produced by generic…
We consider simple bilevel optimization problems where the goal is to compute among the optimal solutions of a composite convex optimization problem, one that minimizes a secondary objective function. Our main contribution is threefold. (i)…
We study fundamental limits of first-order stochastic optimization in a range of nonconvex settings, including L-smooth functions satisfying Quasar-Convexity (QC), Quadratic Growth (QG), and Restricted Secant Inequalities (RSI). While the…
We present two first-order, sequential optimization algorithms to solve constrained optimization problems. We consider a black-box setting with a priori unknown, non-convex objective and constraint functions that have Lipschitz continuous…
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…
Bilevel optimization problems embed the optimality of a subproblem as a constraint of another optimization problem. We introduce the concept of near-optimality robustness for bilevel optimization, protecting the upper-level solution…
Hierarchical optimization refers to problems with interdependent decision variables and objectives, such as minimax and bilevel formulations. While various algorithms have been proposed, existing methods and analyses lack adaptivity in…
We note that known methods achieving the optimal oracle complexity for first order convex optimization require quadratic memory, and ask whether this is necessary, and more broadly seek to characterize the minimax number of first order…
We study the optimal lower and upper complexity bounds for finding approximate solutions to the composite problem $\min_x\ f(x)+h(Ax-b)$, where $f$ is smooth and $h$ is convex. Given access to the proximal operator of $h$, for strongly…
Bilevel optimization has been successfully applied to many important machine learning problems. Algorithms for solving bilevel optimization have been studied under various settings. In this paper, we study the nonconvex-strongly-convex…
We study the question of whether parallelization in the exploration of the feasible set can be used to speed up convex optimization, in the local oracle model of computation. We show that the answer is negative for both deterministic and…
In this paper, we study a class of deterministically constrained stochastic optimization problems. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-stochastic stationary point, where the expected violations of both constraints and…
We study the complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz objectives which are possibly neither smooth nor convex, using only noisy function evaluations. Recent works proposed several stochastic zero-order…
Integrated learning and optimization (ILO) is a framework in contextual optimization which aims to train a predictive model for the probability distribution of the underlying problem data uncertainty, with the goal of enhancing the quality…
A parametric class of trust-region algorithms for constrained nonconvex optimization is analyzed, where the objective function is never computed. By defining appropriate first-order stationarity criteria, we are able to extend the Adagrad…
Previous algorithms can solve convex-concave minimax problems $\min_{x \in \mathcal{X}} \max_{y \in \mathcal{Y}} f(x,y)$ with $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2/3})$ second-order oracle calls using Newton-type methods. This result has been…