English
Related papers

Related papers: From Saddle Points Toward Global Minima: A Newton-…

200 papers

We develop two novel couplings between general pure-jump L\'evy processes in $\R^d$ and apply them to obtain upper bounds on the rate of convergence in an appropriate Wasserstein distance on the path space for a wide class of L\'evy…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-06-19 Jorge González Cázares , David Kramer-Bang , Aleksandar Mijatović

Gradient descent and its variants are widely used in machine learning. However, oracle access of gradient may not be available in many applications, limiting the direct use of gradient descent. This paper proposes a method of estimating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-07 Qinbo Bai , Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

In this paper, we introduce some new iterative optimisation algorithms on Riemannian manifolds and Hilbert spaces which have good global convergence guarantees to local minima. More precisely, these algorithms have the following properties:…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-29 Tuyen Trung Truong

In this paper, we study a consensus-based optimization method for nonconvex bi-level optimization, where the objective is to minimize an upper-level function over the set of global minimizers of a lower-level problem. The proposed approach…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-20 Yutong Chao , Xudong Sun , Konstantin Riedl , Majid Khadiv , Jalal Etesami

Second-order methods are provably faster than first-order methods, and their efficient implementations for large-scale optimization problems have attracted significant attention. Yet, optimization problems in ML often have nonsmooth…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-10 Amal Alphonse , Pavel Dvurechensky , Clemens Sirotenko

High-dimensional non-convex optimization problems in engineering design, control, and learning are often hindered by saddle points, flat plateaus, and strongly anisotropic curvature. This paper develops a unified, curvature-adaptive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-04 Ronald Katende , Henry Kasumba

We propose a novel trust region method for solving a class of nonsmooth, nonconvex composite-type optimization problems. The approach embeds inexact semismooth Newton steps for finding zeros of a normal map-based stationarity measure for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-04 Wenqing Ouyang , Andre Milzarek

Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-29 Elad Hazan , Kfir Y. Levy , Shai Shalev-Shwartz

Recent applications that arise in machine learning have surged significant interest in solving min-max saddle point games. This problem has been extensively studied in the convex-concave regime for which a global equilibrium solution can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-01 Maher Nouiehed , Maziar Sanjabi , Tianjian Huang , Jason D. Lee , Meisam Razaviyayn

Satisfaction of the strict saddle property has become a standard assumption in non-convex optimization, and it ensures that many first-order optimization algorithms will almost always escape saddle points. However, functions exist in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-23 Matthew Ubl , Kasra Yazdani , Matthew T. Hale

In the paper, we generalize the approach Gasnikov et. al, 2017, which allows to solve (stochastic) convex optimization problems with an inexact gradient-free oracle, to the convex-concave saddle-point problem. The proposed approach works,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-13 Aleksandr Beznosikov , Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Alexander Gasnikov

We address the problem of efficiently computing Wasserstein distances for multiple pairs of distributions drawn from a meta-distribution. To this end, we propose a fast estimation method based on regressing Wasserstein distance on sliced…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Khai Nguyen , Hai Nguyen , Nhat Ho

We prove the first convergence guarantees for a subgradient method minimizing a generic Lipschitz function over generic Lipschitz inequality constraints. No smoothness or convexity (or weak convexity) assumptions are made. Instead, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-16 Benjamin Grimmer , Zhichao Jia

This paper addresses the optimization problem of minimizing non-convex continuous functions, which is relevant in the context of high-dimensional machine learning applications characterized by over-parametrization. We analyze a randomized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Jim Zhao , Aurelien Lucchi , Nikita Doikov

Natural Gradient Descent, a second-degree optimization method motivated by the information geometry, makes use of the Fisher Information Matrix instead of the Hessian which is typically used. However, in many cases, the Fisher Information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Rajesh Shrestha

Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-17 Xi He , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Mikhail Smelyanskiy , Martin Takáč

This contribution features an accelerated computation of the Sinkhorn's algorithm, which approximates the Wasserstein transportation distance, by employing nonequispaced fast Fourier transforms (NFFT). The algorithm proposed allows…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-07 Rajmadan Lakshmanan , Alois Pichler , Daniel Potts

We formulate well-posed continuous-time generative flows for learning distributions that are supported on low-dimensional manifolds through Wasserstein proximal regularizations of $f$-divergences. Wasserstein-1 proximal operators regularize…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-17 Hyemin Gu , Markos A. Katsoulakis , Luc Rey-Bellet , Benjamin J. Zhang

Wasserstein Discriminant Analysis (WDA) is a new supervised method that can improve classification of high-dimensional data by computing a suitable linear map onto a lower dimensional subspace. Following the blueprint of classical Linear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-21 Rémi Flamary , Marco Cuturi , Nicolas Courty , Alain Rakotomamonjy

We introduce adaptive, tuning-free step size schedules for gradient-based sampling algorithms obtained as time-discretizations of Wasserstein gradient flows. The result is a suite of tuning-free sampling algorithms, including tuning-free…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-30 Louis Sharrock , Christopher Nemeth