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We study the unconstrained and the minimax saddle point variants of the convex multi-stage stochastic programming problem, where consecutive decisions are coupled through the objective functions, rather than through the constraints. We…

We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…

We propose a data-driven mean-curvature solver for the level-set method. This work is the natural extension to $\mathbb{R}^3$ of our two-dimensional strategy in [DOI: 10.1007/s10915-022-01952-2][1] and the hybrid inference system of [DOI:…

This paper proposes a new method for finding closed-loop saddle points in zero-sum linear-quadratic stochastic differential games by decoupling their inherent structure. Specifically, we develop a nested iterative scheme that constructs a…

Gradient descent is a popular algorithm in optimization, and its performance in convex settings is mostly well understood. In non-convex settings, it has been shown that gradient descent is able to escape saddle points asymptotically and…

Gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent are central to modern machine learning, yet their behavior under large step sizes remains theoretically unclear. Recent work suggests that acceleration often arises near the edge of…

We consider escaping saddle points of nonconvex problems where only the function evaluations can be accessed. Although a variety of works have been proposed, the majority of them require either second or first-order information, and only a…

We consider a step search method for continuous optimization under a stochastic setting where the function values and gradients are available only through inexact probabilistic zeroth- and first-order oracles. Unlike the stochastic gradient…

Stochastic gradient descent algorithms for training linear and kernel predictors are gaining more and more importance, thanks to their scalability. While various methods have been proposed to speed up their convergence, the model selection…

In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…

Matrix completion, where we wish to recover a low rank matrix by observing a few entries from it, is a widely studied problem in both theory and practice with wide applications. Most of the provable algorithms so far on this problem have…

Steady states are invaluable in the study of dynamical systems. High-dimensional dynamical systems, due to a separation of time-scales, often evolve towards a lower dimensional manifold $M$. We introduce an approach to locate saddle points…

In this paper, a gradient-free distributed algorithm is introduced to solve a set constrained optimization problem under a directed communication network. Specifically, at each time-step, the agents locally compute a so-called…

We propose a descent subgradient algorithm for unconstrained nonsmooth nonconvex multiobjective optimization problems. To find a descent direction, we present an iterative process that efficiently approximates the Goldstein subdifferential…

We consider single and multiobjective simulation-based optimization problems. Simulation-based optimization has traditionally used both model-based and search-based methods, often in isolation. Model-based methods include trust region…

This paper studies decision-making and statistical inference for two-sided matching markets via matrix completion. In contrast to the independent sampling assumed in classical matrix completion literature, the observed entries, which arise…

A major approach to saddle point optimization $\min_x\max_y f(x, y)$ is a gradient based approach as is popularized by generative adversarial networks (GANs). In contrast, we analyze an alternative approach relying only on an oracle that…

In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…

This paper presents an auto-conditioned proximal gradient method for nonconvex optimization. The method determines the stepsize using an estimation of local curvature and does not require any prior knowledge of problem parameters and any…

We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite…