相关论文: Can We Find Near-Approximately-Stationary Points o…

We give nearly matching upper and lower bounds on the oracle complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points ($\| \nabla F(x) \| \leq\epsilon$) in stochastic convex optimization. We jointly analyze the oracle complexity in both the local…

We study the complexity of producing $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary points of Lipschitz objectives which are possibly neither smooth nor convex, using only noisy function evaluations. Recent works proposed several stochastic zero-order…

The use of min-max optimization in adversarial training of deep neural network classifiers and training of generative adversarial networks has motivated the study of nonconvex-nonconcave optimization objectives, which frequently arise in…

Variance reduction techniques like SVRG provide simple and fast algorithms for optimizing a convex finite-sum objective. For nonconvex objectives, these techniques can also find a first-order stationary point (with small gradient). However,…

We propose an efficient algorithm for finding first-order Nash equilibria in min-max problems of the form $\min_{x \in X}\max_{y\in Y} F(x,y)$, where the objective function is smooth in both variables and concave with respect to $y$; the…

We propose a quasi-Newton-type method for nonconvex optimization with Lipschitz continuous gradients and Hessians. The algorithm finds an $\varepsilon$-stationary point within $\tilde{\mathrm{O}}(d^{1/4} \varepsilon^{-13/8})$ gradient…

We exploit analogies between first-order algorithms for constrained optimization and non-smooth dynamical systems to design a new class of accelerated first-order algorithms for constrained optimization. Unlike Frank-Wolfe or projected…

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…

Motivated by a class of applied problems arising from physical layer based security in a digital communication system, in particular, by a secrecy sum-rate maximization problem, this paper studies a nonsmooth, difference-of-convex (dc)…

Acceleration for non-convex functions is a fundamental challenge in optimisation. We revisit star-convex functions, which are strictly unimodal on all lines through a minimizer. [1] accelerate unconstrained star-convex minimization of…

Optimization problems with composite functions consist of an objective function which is the sum of a smooth and a (convex) nonsmooth term. This particular structure is exploited by the class of proximal gradient methods and some of their…

We consider the case of derivative-free algorithms for non-convex optimization, also known as zero order algorithms, that use only function evaluations rather than gradients. For a wide variety of gradient approximators based on finite…

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…

We consider smooth stochastic convex optimization problems in the context of algorithms which are based on directional derivatives of the objective function. This context can be considered as an intermediate one between derivative-free…

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

We propose a primal-dual smoothing framework for finding a near-stationary point of a class of non-smooth non-convex optimization problems with max-structure. We analyze the primal and dual gradient complexities of the framework via two…

Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…

Stochastic non-smooth convex optimization constitutes a class of problems in machine learning and operations research. This paper considers minimization of a non-smooth function based on stochastic subgradients. When the function has a…

We explore why many recently proposed robust estimation problems are efficiently solvable, even though the underlying optimization problems are non-convex. We study the loss landscape of these robust estimation problems, and identify the…