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In this work, we consider bilevel optimization when the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent works show that with a Hessian-vector product (HVP) oracle, one can provably find an $\epsilon$-stationary point within…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Lesi Chen , Yaohua Ma , Jingzhao Zhang

Algorithms for bilevel optimization often encounter Hessian computations, which are prohibitive in high dimensions. While recent works offer first-order methods for unconstrained bilevel problems, the constrained setting remains relatively…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-22 Guy Kornowski , Swati Padmanabhan , Kai Wang , Zhe Zhang , Suvrit Sra

We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Taha El Bakkali , El Mahdi Chayti , Qiuyi Zhang , Imane Rahali , Omar Saadi

It is shown that the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator of a univariate log-concave probability density satisfies desirable consistency properties in the tail regions. Specifically, let $P$ and $f$ denote the true underlying…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Didier B. Ryter , Lutz Duembgen

In this paper, we revisit the recently established theoretical guarantees for the convergence of the Langevin Monte Carlo algorithm of sampling from a smooth and (strongly) log-concave density. We improve the existing results when the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-07-31 Arnak S. Dalalyan

Existing guarantees for algorithms sampling from nonlogconcave measures on $\mathbb{R}^d$ are generally inexplicit or unscalable. Even for the class of measures with logdensities that have bounded Hessians and are strongly concave outside a…

Computation · Statistics 2025-05-27 Martin Chak

Existing decentralized stochastic optimization methods assume the lower-level loss function is strongly convex and the stochastic gradient noise has finite variance. These strong assumptions typically are not satisfied in real-world machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xinwen Zhang , Yihan Zhang , Heng Liang , Hongchang Gao

This paper studies minimax optimization problems $\min_x \max_y f(x,y)$, where $f(x,y)$ is $m_x$-strongly convex with respect to $x$, $m_y$-strongly concave with respect to $y$ and $(L_x,L_{xy},L_y)$-smooth. Zhang et al. provided the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Yuanhao Wang , Jian Li

We consider the stochastic optimization problem with smooth but not necessarily convex objectives in the heavy-tailed noise regime, where the stochastic gradient's noise is assumed to have bounded $p$th moment ($p\in(1,2]$). Zhang et al.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Zijian Liu , Jiawei Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

We introduce a primal-dual stochastic gradient oracle method for distributed convex optimization problems over networks. We show that the proposed method is optimal in terms of communication steps. Additionally, we propose a new analysis…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-28 Darina Dvinskikh , Eduard Gorbunov , Alexander Gasnikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Cesar A. Uribe

This paper considers the problem of asynchronous stochastic nonconvex optimization with heavy-tailed gradient noise and arbitrarily heterogeneous computation times across workers. We propose an asynchronous normalized stochastic gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-28 Yidong Wu , Luo Luo

We design an algorithm which finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point (with $\|\nabla F(x)\|\le \epsilon$) using $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector products, matching guarantees that were previously available…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Yossi Arjevani , Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi , Dylan J. Foster , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-24 Nuri Mert Vural , Lu Yu , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Stanislav Volgushev , Murat A. Erdogdu

In existing distributed stochastic optimization studies, it is usually assumed that the gradient noise has a bounded variance. However, recent research shows that the heavy-tailed noise, which allows an unbounded variance, is closer to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-15 Jun Hu , Chao Sun , Bo Chen , Jianzheng Wang , Zheming Wang

Recent studies have provided both empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in various scenarios. Such heavy tails potentially result in iterates with diverging…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-23 Hongjian Wang , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu , Umut Şimşekli , Murat A. Erdogdu

This paper develops negative curvature methods for continuous nonlinear unconstrained optimization in stochastic settings, in which function, gradient, and Hessian information is available only through probabilistic oracles, i.e., oracles…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-05 Albert S. Berahas , Raghu Bollapragada , Wanping Dong

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-15 Adrien Taylor , Yoel Drori

We propose a projection-free conditional gradient-type algorithm for smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions and the constraint set is a closed convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Tesi Xiao , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Saeed Ghadimi

This work studies constrained stochastic optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are convex and expressed as compositions of stochastic functions. The problem arises in the context of fair classification, fair…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Srujan Teja Thomdapu , Harshvardhan , Ketan Rajawat

Given an implicit $n\times n$ matrix $A$ with oracle access $x^TA x$ for any $x\in \mathbb{R}^n$, we study the query complexity of randomized algorithms for estimating the trace of the matrix. This problem has many applications in quantum…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2014-05-29 Karl Wimmer , Yi Wu , Peng Zhang