Related papers: Optimal Methods for Unknown Piecewise Smooth Probl…
Stochastic MPECs have found increasing relevance for modeling a broad range of settings in engineering and statistics. Yet, there seem to be no efficient first/zeroth-order schemes equipped with non-asymptotic rate guarantees for resolving…
We study nonconvex optimization landscapes for learning overcomplete representations, including learning (i) sparsely used overcomplete dictionaries and (ii) convolutional dictionaries, where these unsupervised learning problems find many…
In regularized risk minimization, the associated optimization problem becomes particularly difficult when both the loss and regularizer are nonsmooth. Existing approaches either have slow or unclear convergence properties, are restricted to…
This paper resolves a longstanding open question pertaining to the design of near-optimal first-order algorithms for smooth and strongly-convex-strongly-concave minimax problems. Current state-of-the-art first-order algorithms find an…
We develop a novel gradient-based algorithm for optimizing nonsmooth nonconvex functions where nonsmoothness arises from explicit nonsmooth operators in the objective's analytical form. Our key innovation involves encoding active smooth…
Focusing on stochastic programming (SP) with covariate information, this paper proposes an empirical risk minimization (ERM) method embedded within a nonconvex piecewise affine decision rule (PADR), which aims to learn the direct mapping…
In this paper, we introduce a new class of nonsmooth convex functions called SOS-convex semialgebraic functions extending the recently proposed notion of SOS-convex polynomials. This class of nonsmooth convex functions covers many common…
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…
We propose a new iteration scheme, the Cauchy-Simplex, to optimize convex problems over the probability simplex $\{w\in\mathbb{R}^n\ |\ \sum_i w_i=1\ \textrm{and}\ w_i\geq0\}$. Specifically, we map the simplex to the positive quadrant of a…
We introduce a notion of self-concordant smoothing for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth and the other nonsmooth. The key highlight is a natural property of the resulting problem's structure that yields a…
In this work, we present new simple and optimal algorithms for solving the variational inequality (VI) problem for $p^{th}$-order smooth, monotone operators -- a problem that generalizes convex optimization and saddle-point problems. Recent…
This paper focuses on investigating an inexact stochastic model-based optimization algorithm that integrates preconditioning techniques for solving stochastic composite optimization problems. The proposed framework unifies and extends the…
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…
In this paper, we propose an improved numerical algorithm for solving minimax problems based on nonsmooth optimization, quadratic programming and iterative process. We also provide a rigorous proof of convergence for our algorithm under…
We present an optimal gradient method for smooth strongly convex optimization. The method is optimal in the sense that its worst-case bound on the distance to an optimal point exactly matches the lower bound on the oracle complexity for the…
In this paper we analyze several new methods for solving nonconvex optimization problems with the objective function formed as a sum of two terms: one is nonconvex and smooth, and another is convex but simple and its structure is known.…
In this work, we leverage GPUs to construct probabilistically collision-free convex sets in robot configuration space on the fly. This extends the use of modern motion planning algorithms that leverage such representations to changing…
In this paper, we present a generic framework to extend existing uniformly optimal convex programming algorithms to solve more general nonlinear, possibly nonconvex, optimization problems. The basic idea is to incorporate a local search…
Due to their importance in various emerging applications, efficient algorithms for solving minimax problems have recently received increasing attention. However, many existing algorithms require prior knowledge of the problem parameters in…
Quasar convexity is a condition that allows some first-order methods to efficiently minimize a function even when the optimization landscape is non-convex. Previous works develop near-optimal accelerated algorithms for minimizing this class…