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We propose a communication- and computation-efficient distributed optimization algorithm using second-order information for solving ERM problems with a nonsmooth regularization term. Current second-order and quasi-Newton methods for this…
The recovery of unknown signals from quadratic measurements finds extensive applications in fields such as phase retrieval, power system state estimation, and unlabeled distance geometry. This paper investigates the finite sample properties…
This work studies applications and generalizations of a simple estimation technique that provides exponential concentration under heavy-tailed distributions, assuming only bounded low-order moments. We show that the technique can be used…
We propose a stochastic variance-reduced cubic regularized Newton method for non-convex optimization. At the core of our algorithm is a novel semi-stochastic gradient along with a semi-stochastic Hessian, which are specifically designed for…
We study the computational complexity of approximating general constrained Markov decision processes. Our primary contribution is the design of a polynomial time $(0,\epsilon)$-additive bicriteria approximation algorithm for finding optimal…
Given a finite metric space $(X\cup Y, \mathbf{d})$ the $k$-median problem is to find a set of $k$ centers $C\subseteq Y$ that minimizes $\sum_{p\in X} \min_{c\in C} \mathbf{d}(p,c)$. In general metrics, the best polynomial time algorithm…
We study efficient algorithms for linear regression and covariance estimation in the absence of Gaussian assumptions on the underlying distributions of samples, making assumptions instead about only finitely-many moments. We focus on how…
Nonconvex sparse models have received significant attention in high-dimensional machine learning. In this paper, we study a new model consisting of a general convex or nonconvex objectives and a variety of continuous nonconvex…
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…
We show that there are no spurious local minima in the non-convex factorized parametrization of low-rank matrix recovery from incoherent linear measurements. With noisy measurements we show all local minima are very close to a global…
In this paper we are concerned with a sequence of univariate random variables with piecewise polynomial means and independent sub-Gaussian noise. The underlying polynomials are allowed to be of arbitrary but fixed degrees. All the other…
We study a class of polynomial optimization problems with a robust polynomial matrix inequality (PMI) constraint where the uncertainty set itself is defined also by a PMI. These can be viewed as matrix generalizations of semi-infinite…
The experimental design problem concerns the selection of k points from a potentially large design pool of p-dimensional vectors, so as to maximize the statistical efficiency regressed on the selected k design points. Statistical efficiency…
We consider the problem of robust mean and location estimation w.r.t. any pseudo-norm of the form $x\in\mathbb{R}^d\to ||x||_S = \sup_{v\in S}<v,x>$ where $S$ is any symmetric subset of $\mathbb{R}^d$. We show that the deviation-optimal…
We consider the mixed regression problem with two components, under adversarial and stochastic noise. We give a convex optimization formulation that provably recovers the true solution, and provide upper bounds on the recovery errors for…
We give the first polynomial-time algorithm for performing linear or polynomial regression resilient to adversarial corruptions in both examples and labels. Given a sufficiently large (polynomial-size) training set drawn i.i.d. from…
We study local complexity measures for stochastic convex optimization problems, providing a local minimax theory analogous to that of H\'{a}jek and Le Cam for classical statistical problems. We give complementary optimality results,…
Estimation and prediction problems for dense signals are often framed in terms of minimax problems over highly symmetric parameter spaces. In this paper, we study minimax problems over l2-balls for high-dimensional linear models with…
We develop a finite-sample optimal estimator for regression discontinuity design when the outcomes are bounded, including binary outcomes as the leading case. Our estimator achieves minimax mean squared error among linear shrinkage…
Stochastic approximation is a foundation for many algorithms found in machine learning and optimization. It is in general slow to converge: the mean square error vanishes as $O(n^{-1})$. A deterministic counterpart known as quasi-stochastic…