Related papers: A practical randomized trust-region method to esca…

Modern machine learning algorithms aim to extract fine-grained information from data to provide accurate predictions, which often conflicts with the goal of privacy protection. This paper addresses the practical and theoretical importance…

The paper studies a distributed gradient descent (DGD) process and considers the problem of showing that in nonconvex optimization problems, DGD typically converges to local minima rather than saddle points. The paper considers…

The randomized coordinate descent (RCD) method is a classical algorithm with simple, lightweight iterations that is widely used for various optimization problems, including the solution of positive semidefinite linear systems. As a linear…

In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…

Worst-case complexity guarantees for nonconvex optimization algorithms have been a topic of growing interest. Multiple frameworks that achieve the best known complexity bounds among a broad class of first- and second-order strategies have…

This work introduces a new method to efficiently solve optimization problems constrained by partial differential equations (PDEs) with uncertain coefficients. The method leverages two sources of inexactness that trade accuracy for speed:…

Forward gradient descent (FGD) has been proposed as a biologically more plausible alternative of gradient descent as it can be computed without backward pass. Considering the linear model with $d$ parameters, previous work has found that…

An increasing number of machine learning problems, such as robust or adversarial variants of existing algorithms, require minimizing a loss function that is itself defined as a maximum. Carrying a loop of stochastic gradient ascent (SGA)…

Optimization algorithms are unlikely to converge to strict saddle points. Proofs to that effect rely on the Center-Stable Manifold Theorem (CSMT), casting algorithms as dynamical systems: $x_{k+1} = g_k(x_k)$. In its standard form, the CSMT…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely adopted iterative method for optimizing differentiable objective functions. In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach to scale up SGD in applications involving non-convex functions…

It is still common to use Q-learning and temporal difference (TD) learning-even though they have divergence issues and sound Gradient TD alternatives exist-because divergence seems rare and they typically perform well. However, recent work…

Gradient clipping is a fundamental tool in Deep Learning, improving the high-probability convergence of stochastic first-order methods like SGD, AdaGrad, and Adam under heavy-tailed noise, which is common in training large language models.…

In this paper, we develop and analyze sub-sampled trust-region methods for solving finite-sum optimization problems. These methods employ subsampling strategies to approximate the gradient and Hessian of the objective function,…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…

The distributed subgradient method (DSG) is a widely discussed algorithm to cope with large-scale distributed optimization problems in the arising machine learning applications. Most exisiting works on DSG focus on ideal communication…

We consider trust-region methods for solving optimization problems where the objective is the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function and a nonsmooth, convex regularizer. We extend the global convergence theory of such methods to include…

This paper presents an algorithm for the efficient approximation of the saddle-extremum persistence diagram of a scalar field. Vidal et al. introduced recently a fast algorithm for such an approximation (by interrupting a progressive…

We consider the stochastic gradient method with random reshuffling ($\mathsf{RR}$) for tackling smooth nonconvex optimization problems. $\mathsf{RR}$ finds broad applications in practice, notably in training neural networks. In this work,…

Many modern machine learning applications - from online principal component analysis to covariance matrix identification and dictionary learning - can be formulated as minimization problems on Riemannian manifolds, and are typically solved…

A stochastic second-order trust region method is proposed, which can be viewed as a second-order extension of the trust-region-ish (TRish) algorithm proposed by Curtis et al. (INFORMS J. Optim. 1(3) 200-220, 2019). In each iteration, a…