Related papers: Stochastic Non-Smooth Non-Convex Optimization with…
We study the problem of finding an $\epsilon$-first-order stationary point (FOSP) of a smooth function, given access only to gradient information. The best-known gradient query complexity for this task, assuming both the gradient and…
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…
In this paper, we consider non-smooth convex optimization with a zeroth-order oracle corrupted by symmetric stochastic noise. Unlike the existing high-probability results requiring the noise to have bounded $\kappa$-th moment with $\kappa…
In this paper, we are concerned with a non-asymptotic analysis of sampling algorithms used in nonconvex optimization. In particular, we obtain non-asymptotic estimates in Wasserstein-1 and Wasserstein-2 distances for a popular class of…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…
Stochastic proximal point methods have recently garnered renewed attention within the optimization community, primarily due to their desirable theoretical properties. Notably, these methods exhibit a convergence rate that is independent of…
Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), as a popular method to train robust models against distribution shift between training and test sets, has received tremendous attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose and analyze…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
We consider a family of algorithms that successively sample and minimize simple stochastic models of the objective function. We show that under reasonable conditions on approximation quality and regularity of the models, any such algorithm…
Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population respond to a deployed classifier by manipulating their features…
In this work, we consider a distributed multi-agent stochastic optimization problem, where each agent holds a local objective function that is smooth and convex, and that is subject to a stochastic process. The goal is for all agents to…
We present a novel gradient-free algorithm to solve a convex stochastic optimization problem, such as those encountered in medicine, physics, and machine learning (e.g., adversarial multi-armed bandit problem), where the objective function…
In this paper we consider stochastic weakly convex composite problems, however without the existence of a stochastic subgradient oracle. We present a derivative free algorithm that uses a two point approximation for computing a gradient…
Machine learning algorithms in high-dimensional settings are highly susceptible to the influence of even a small fraction of structured outliers, making robust optimization techniques essential. In particular, within the…
We present a stochastic optimization method that uses a fourth-order regularized model to find local minima of smooth and potentially non-convex objective functions with a finite-sum structure. This algorithm uses sub-sampled derivatives…
We analyze the global and local behavior of gradient-like flows under stochastic errors towards the aim of solving convex optimization problems with noisy gradient input. We first study the unconstrained differentiable convex case, using a…
This paper studies high-order evaluation complexity for partially separable convexly-constrained optimization involving non-Lipschitzian group sparsity terms in a nonconvex objective function. We propose a partially separable adaptive…
We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is popular in real-world applications that accessing the gradient information is expensive or unavailable. Recently, adaptive ZO methods that normalize gradient estimators by the empirical standard deviation…
We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…