Related papers: Stochastic Non-Smooth Non-Convex Optimization with…
An adaptive regularization algorithm for unconstrained nonconvex optimization is presented in which the objective function is never evaluated, but only derivatives are used. This algorithm belongs to the class of adaptive regularization…
In this work, we focus on the study of stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order gradient information and uses only function evaluations. The problem of ZO optimization has emerged in many recent machine…
We introduce a hybrid stochastic estimator to design stochastic gradient algorithms for solving stochastic optimization problems. Such a hybrid estimator is a convex combination of two existing biased and unbiased estimators and leads to…
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,…
When the nonconvex problem is complicated by stochasticity, the sample complexity of stochastic first-order methods may depend linearly on the problem dimension, which is undesirable for large-scale problems. In this work, we propose…
We consider unconstrained stochastic optimization problems with no available gradient information. Such problems arise in settings from derivative-free simulation optimization to reinforcement learning. We propose an adaptive sampling…
We propose a new primal-dual homotopy smoothing algorithm for a linearly constrained convex program, where neither the primal nor the dual function has to be smooth or strongly convex. The best known iteration complexity solving such a…
Poisson likelihood models have been prevalently used in imaging, social networks, and time series analysis. We propose fast, simple, theoretically-grounded, and versatile, optimization algorithms for Poisson likelihood modeling. The Poisson…
This paper studies the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem over a network of agents, where agents only access stochastic zeroth-order information about their local cost functions and collaboratively optimize the global…
In this paper, we study a class of composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a general smooth and nonsmooth component, together with a relatively simple nonsmooth term. While restart strategies…
Recent results in non-convex stochastic optimization demonstrate the convergence of popular adaptive algorithms (e.g., AdaGrad) under the $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness condition, but the rate of convergence is a higher-order polynomial in terms…
In this paper, we study a class of deterministically constrained stochastic optimization problems. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-stochastic stationary point, where the expected violations of both constraints and…
We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…
This paper presents an extension of stochastic gradient descent for the minimization of Lipschitz continuous loss functions. Our motivation is for use in non-smooth non-convex stochastic optimization problems, which are frequently…
We consider a distributionally robust second-order stochastic dominance constrained optimization problem. We require the dominance constraints hold with respect to all probability distributions in a Wasserstein ball centered at the…
We propose a method for zeroth order stochastic convex optimization that attains the suboptimality rate of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^{7}T^{-1/2})$ after $T$ queries for a convex bounded function $f:{\mathbb R}^n\to{\mathbb R}$. The method is…
We study fundamental limits of first-order stochastic optimization in a range of nonconvex settings, including L-smooth functions satisfying Quasar-Convexity (QC), Quadratic Growth (QG), and Restricted Secant Inequalities (RSI). While the…
Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem,…
This paper deals with composite optimization problems having the objective function formed as the sum of two terms, one has Lipschitz continuous gradient along random subspaces and may be nonconvex and the second term is simple and…
We study the problem of zero-order optimization of a strongly convex function. The goal is to find the minimizer of the function by a sequential exploration of its values, under measurement noise. We study the impact of higher order…