Smooth finite-sum optimization has been widely studied in both convex and nonconvex settings. However, existing lower bounds for finite-sum optimization are mostly limited to the setting where each component function is (strongly) convex, while the lower bounds for nonconvex finite-sum optimization remain largely unsol…
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New algorithm solves nonconvex-convex minimax problems efficiently.
In this paper, we focus on solving an important class of nonconvex optimization problems which includes many problems for example signal processing over a networked multi-agent system and distributed learning over networks. Motivated by many applications in which the local objective function is the sum of smooth but po…
Paper develops algorithms for nonsmooth, nonconvex statistical learning problems.
Optimizes nonconvex optimization by converting it to static regret minimization.
Improved DP optimization for nonconvex, nonsmooth objectives with reduced sample complexity.
New algorithm solves structured nonconvex-nonconcave min-max problems.
Improved complexity for smooth nonconvex optimization using quasi-Newton methods.
A new biased gradient descent method for conditional stochastic optimization.
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and Hessian information of the smooth part of the objective function is available via…
New SGDA method speeds up nonconvex minimax optimization.
New technique reduces bias in CSO problems, improving sample complexity.
Proposes BMME for optimizing nonsmooth nonconvex problems with block structure.
PPGD solves nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems without KL property.
Adaptive gradient methods are workhorses in deep learning. However, the convergence guarantees of adaptive gradient methods for nonconvex optimization have not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we provide a fine-grained convergence analysis for a general class of adaptive gradient methods including AMSGrad, RMSPr…
In this note, we focus on smooth nonconvex optimization problems that obey: (1) all local minimizers are also global; and (2) around any saddle point or local maximizer, the objective has a negative directional curvature. Concrete applications such as dictionary learning, generalized phase retrieval, and orthogonal ten…
Improved guarantees for nonconvex matrix factorization with rank overparameterization.
We study a stochastic and distributed algorithm for nonconvex problems whose objective consists of a sum of nonconvex -smooth functions, plus a nonsmooth regularizer. The proposed NonconvEx primal-dual SpliTTing (NESTT) algorithm splits the problem into subproblems, and utilizes an augmented Lagrangian b…
New algorithms reduce complexity for solving nonconvex optimization problems with stochastic objectives and constraints.
New algorithm tackles nonconvex machine learning problems with adaptive normalization and independent sampling.
New algorithm for nonconvex optimization on constrained Riemannian manifolds converges quickly.
Many optimization algorithms converge to stationary points. When the underlying problem is nonconvex, they may get trapped at local minimizers and occasionally stagnate near saddle points. We propose the Run-and-Inspect Method, which adds an "inspect" phase to existing algorithms that helps escape from non-global stati…
Efficient solver for nonconvex tensor regularization reduces computational cost.
The paper analyzes PPM for nonconvex-nonconcave problems, identifying three regions with varying convergence guarantees.
The paper proves convergence to global optima for a class of distributed algorithms for nonconvex optimization in network-based multi-agent settings. Agents are permitted to communicate over a time-varying undirected graph. Each agent is assumed to possess a local objective function (assumed to be smooth, but possibly …
Paper establishes lower bounds for finite-sum optimization problems using novel construction methods.
DIFF2 improves differential privacy in nonconvex optimization with better utility bounds.
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly non-differentiable but convex component. We propose a proximal stochastic gradie…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with conventional stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithm that uses two reference …
Lower bounds found for nonconvex-strongly-concave min-max optimization problems.
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem is very limited. For example, it is not known whether the proximal stochastic gra…
SONATA algorithm converges to solutions of nonconvex smooth functions with KL property.
Method solves nonconvex constrained optimization problems with a new augmented Lagrangian approach.
Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) and sparse canonical correlation analysis (CCA) are two essential techniques from high-dimensional statistics and machine learning for analyzing large-scale data. Both problems can be formulated as an optimization problem with nonsmooth objective and nonconvex constraints. Sinc…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing theoretical results for SGD applied to nonconvex objective functions are far from …
New nonconvex penalty smooths at origin for deep learning.
New lower bounds for bilevel optimization with first-order oracles.
Within the unmanageably large class of nonconvex optimization, we consider the rich subclass of nonsmooth problems that have composite objectives---this already includes the extensively studied convex, composite objective problems as a special case. For this subclass, we introduce a powerful, new framework that permits…
We propose a new stochastic first-order algorithmic framework to solve stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problems that covers both finite-sum and expectation settings. Our algorithms rely on the SARAH estimator introduced in (Nguyen et al, 2017) and consist of two steps: a proximal gradient and an averaging s…
Improved stability for matrix recovery from rank-one measurements.
MAML optimizes shared priors for subtasks in a nonconvex meta-objective.
Improved SGD methods converge faster for nonconvex optimization.
SARAH and SPIDER are two recently developed stochastic variance-reduced algorithms, and SPIDER has been shown to achieve a near-optimal first-order oracle complexity in smooth nonconvex optimization. However, SPIDER uses an accuracy-dependent stepsize that slows down the convergence in practice, and cannot handle objec…
Simple DP algorithms find approximate solutions for nonconvex ERM.
We propose a randomized nonmonotone block proximal gradient (RNBPG) method for minimizing the sum of a smooth (possibly nonconvex) function and a block-separable (possibly nonconvex nonsmooth) function. At each iteration, this method randomly picks a block according to any prescribed probability distribution and solves…
New SGD analysis for nonconvex optimization finds optimal rates.
Novel coordinate descent (CD) methods are proposed for minimizing nonconvex functions consisting of three terms: (i) a continuously differentiable term, (ii) a simple convex term, and (iii) a concave and continuous term. First, by extending randomized CD to nonsmooth nonconvex settings, we develop a coordinate subgradi…
The (global) Lipschitz smoothness condition is crucial in establishing the convergence theory for most optimization methods. Unfortunately, most machine learning and signal processing problems are not Lipschitz smooth. This motivates us to generalize the concept of Lipschitz smoothness condition to the relative smoothn…