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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

168,657 papers · 148 categories

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2995978961,194 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for first-order methods

Optimal first-order methods are shown to be fundamental limits in functional estimation.

problem Optimal functional estimation under weak conditions.
method Formalization of functional estimation with black-box nuisance function estimates and derivation of minimax lower bounds.
result First-order methods are optimal under weak conditions, but higher-order methods can outperform them when nuisance function structure is known.

New algorithm reduces online decision-making regret with efficient LP re-solving and parallel first-order method.

problem Worse regret guarantees and high computational cost of LP-based OLP algorithms.
method Combines LP-based and first-order OLP methods, re-solving LP subproblems periodically and using parallel first-order method.
result Achieves O(log(T/f)+f)\mathscr{O}(\log (T/f) + \sqrt{f}) regret, balancing computational efficiency and superior regret guarantee.

Unified bounds for iterative algorithms with Gaussian data matrices.

problem Establishing non-asymptotic bounds for iterative algorithms with Gaussian data.
method Explicit coupling between iterates and Gaussian process with deterministic covariance.
result Tight, dimension-free bounds for generalized first-order methods.

We establish that first-order methods avoid saddle points for almost all initializations. Our results apply to a wide variety of first-order methods, including gradient descent, block coordinate descent, mirror descent and variants thereof. The connecting thread is that such algorithms can be studied from a dynamical s…

2017-10-20abs ↗pdf ↗

Develops a first-order interior-point method for solving constrained variational inequalities.

problem Solving constrained variational inequalities with nontrivial constraints.
method ADMM-based interior-point method for constrained VIs (ACVI).
result First-order interior-point method with global convergence guarantees for general cVI problems.

New methods solve optimization problems with heavy-tailed noise, improving upon existing complexity bounds.

problem Optimization problems with heavy-tailed noise and weakly average smoothness.
method Normalized stochastic first-order methods with Polyak, multi-extrapolated, and recursive momentum.
result First-order oracle complexity results for finding approximate stochastic stationary points under heavy-tailed noise.

A new method speeds up quantum state estimation.

problem Exponential growth in sample size and dimension for quantum state tomography.
method Stochastic mirror descent with Burg entropy.
result Optimization error vanishes at a O((1/t)dlogt)O (\sqrt{ ( 1 / t ) d \log t }) rate.

DEO uses gradient information to escape saddle points in neural networks.

problem Training deep neural networks struggles with flat regions and saddle points.
method Dimer-Enhanced Optimization (DEO) uses gradient information to estimate curvature and escape saddle points.
result DEO improves training efficiency and performance compared to standard first-order methods.

Unified approach for first-order methods with Markovian noise in stochastic optimization and variational inequalities.

problem Stochastic optimization problems with Markovian noise.
method Unified theoretical analysis of first-order gradient methods using randomized batching and multilevel Monte Carlo.
result Optimal (linear) dependence on the mixing time of the noise sequence, eliminating previous limiting assumptions.

A new first-order sampler improves diffusion probabilistic model sampling quality.

problem The belief that first-order methods are inherently slower for diffusion probabilistic model sampling.
method A novel training-free, first-order sampler that approximates the forward-value evaluation via a one-step lookahead predictor.
result The proposed sampler provably approximates the ideal forward-value trajectory while retaining first-order convergence and can improve sample quality under the same NFE budget.

First-order ANIL learns shared representations even with overparametrization.

problem Lack of theoretical evidence for model-agnostic meta-learning (ANIL) learning shared representations.
method First-order ANIL with a linear two-layer network architecture, showing asymptotically low-rank solutions with overparametrization.
result First-order ANIL learns linear shared representations, even with overparametrization, and performs well in adaptation.

New methods reduce constraint violations to certainty in stochastic optimization.

problem Finding a point with certain constraint satisfaction and near-stationarity.
method Single-loop variance-reduced stochastic first-order methods with truncated momentum schemes.
result Achieves strong convergence guarantees for εε-stochastic stationary points with certain constraint satisfaction.

New method accelerates steepest descent for convex optimization.

problem Achieving acceleration for general p\ell_p smooth functions.
method Primal-dual iterate sequences with differing norms, implicitly determined interpolation parameter.
result Improves iteration complexity to O(d12p)O(d^{1-\frac{2}{p}}) for p\ell_p norm smooth problems.

First order discretizations of Langevin diffusion can achieve better generalization error with additional smoothness assumptions.

problem Analyzing generalization error for first order discretizations of Langevin diffusion.
method Providing a sufficient smoothness condition to show that first order methods can achieve arbitrarily runtime complexity for a given expected generalization error.
result First order methods can achieve arbitrarily runtime complexity with additional smoothness assumptions.

First-order method solves stochastic bilevel optimization with linear constraints.

problem Stochastic bilevel optimization with linear constraints and noise.
method Developed a novel framework using gradient-based techniques and smoothed penalty functions.
result Achieved finite-time convergence guarantees for (δ,ε)(δ, ε)-Goldstein stationary points.

A new method learns node embeddings for signed directed networks by capturing both first-order and high-order topologies.

problem Learning representative node embeddings for signed directed networks considering both first-order and high-order topologies.
method Proposes a decoupled variational embedding (DVE) method that leverages a specially designed auto-encoder structure to capture both first-order and high-order topologies.
result Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of DVE in link sign prediction and node recommendation tasks.

Novel methods for accelerating optimization in complex bilevel and minimax problems.

problem Optimization challenges in bilevel and minimax problems, especially when strong convexity assumptions are not met.
method Accelerated fully first-order methods for Bilevel Optimization (BLO) and Minimax Optimization (NCSC).
result State-of-the-art complexity for finding approximate second-order stationary points in BLO and NCSC.

Paper develops fast method for computing optimal transport.

problem Efficient computation of optimal transport distance between distributions.
method Entropy-regularized extragradient method for first-order optimization.
result Achieves state-of-the-art runtime guarantees and good numerical performance.

Geodesic convexity generalizes the notion of (vector space) convexity to nonlinear metric spaces. But unlike convex optimization, geodesically convex (g-convex) optimization is much less developed. In this paper we contribute to the understanding of g-convex optimization by developing iteration complexity analysis for …

2016-02-19abs ↗pdf ↗

Many problems in machine learning and game theory can be formulated as saddle-point problems, for which various first-order methods have been developed and proven efficient in practice. Under the general convex-concave assumption, most first-order methods only guarantee an ergodic convergence rate, that is, the uniform…

2019-03-26abs ↗pdf ↗

A wide class of regularization problems in machine learning and statistics employ a regularization term which is obtained by composing a simple convex function ωwith a linear transformation. This setting includes Group Lasso methods, the Fused Lasso and other total variation methods, multi-task learning methods and man…

2011-04-07abs ↗pdf ↗

Optimized method tackles convex optimization with heavy-tailed noise.

problem Convex optimization problems with noisy gradients.
method Vanilla stochastic proximal subgradient method without gradient clipping or normalization.
result Achieves optimal complexity for various convex optimization types under heavy-tailed noise.

New sampling method guarantees approximate first-order stationary points for non-convex functions.

problem Sampling from non-log-concave densities with non-convex potential functions.
method Averaged Langevin Monte Carlo with complexity analysis.
result Langevin Monte Carlo outputs a sample with ε-relative Fisher information after O(L²d²/ε²) iterations.

Unified analysis of first-order methods for smooth games using IQCs.

problem Certify convergence rates of first-order methods for smooth and strongly-monotone games.
method Adapted integral quadratic constraints (IQCs) to study first-order methods and derive tight upper bounds of convergence rates.
result First global convergence rate for the negative momentum method with O(κ1.5)\mathcal{O}(κ^{1.5}) iteration complexity.

Compensation methods correct overestimation of adversarial robustness in neural networks.

problem Overestimation of adversarial robustness using first-order attack methods.
method Proposed compensation methods address inaccurate gradient computation and reduce backpropagations.
result Empirical evaluation of adversarial robustness is improved with these methods.

Develops first-order methods for average-reward MDPs with strong guarantees.

problem Lack of strong theoretical guarantees for first-order methods in AMDPs.
method Average-reward stochastic policy mirror descent (SPMD) and variance-reduced temporal difference (VRTD) methods.
result Establishes sample complexity results for solving AMDPs.

The paper analyzes reinforcement learning methods for estimating weights and quality functions with fast convergence rates.

problem Estimating weights and quality functions in reinforcement learning with function approximation.
method The paper uses minimax methods for estimating marginal importance weights and q-functions.
result The minimax approach enables fast rates of convergence for weights and quality functions, achieving first-order efficiency.