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We provide several algorithms for constrained optimization of a large class of convex problems, including softmax, $ell_p$ regression, and logistic regression. Central to our approach is the notion of width reduction, a technique which has proven immensely useful in the context of maximum flow [Christiano et al., STOC11] and, more recently, $ell_p$ regression [Adil et al., SODA19], in terms of improving the iteration complexity from $O(m^{1/2})$ to $tilde{O}(m^{1/3})$, where $m$ is the number of rows of the design matrix, and where each iteration amounts to a linear system solve. However, a considerable drawback is that these methods require both problem-specific potentials and individually tailored analyses. As our main contribution, we initiate a new direction of study by presenting the first unified approach to achieving $m^{1/3}$-type rates. Notably, our method goes beyond these previously considered problems to more broadly capture quasi-self-concordant losses, a class which has recently generated much interest and includes the well-studied problem of logistic regression, among others. In order to do so, we develop a unified width reduction method for carefully handling these losses based on a more general set of potentials. Additionally, we directly achieve $m^{1/3}$-type rates in the constrained setting without the need for any explicit acceleration schemes, thus naturally complementing recent work based on a ball-oracle approach [Carmon et al., NeurIPS20].
We consider the use of a curvature-adaptive step size in gradient-based iterative methods, including quasi-Newton methods, for minimizing self-concordant functions, extending an approach first proposed for Newtons method by Nesterov. This step size has a simple expression that can be computed analytically; hence, line searches are not needed. We show that using this step size in the BFGS method (and quasi-Newton methods in the Broyden convex class other than the DFP method) results in superlinear convergence for strongly convex self-concordant functions. We present numerical experiments comparing gradient descent and BFGS methods using the curvature-adaptive step size to traditional methods on deterministic logistic regression problems, and t
We develop a new primitive for stochastic optimization: a low-bias, low-cost estimator of the minimizer $x_star$ of any Lipschitz strongly-convex function. In particular, we use a multilevel Monte-Carlo approach due to Blanchet and Glynn to turn any optimal stochastic gradient method into an estimator of $x_star$ with bias $delta$, variance $O(log(1/delta))$, and an expected sampling cost of $O(log(1/delta))$ stochastic gradient evaluations. As an immediate consequence, we obtain cheap and nearly unbiased gradient estimators for the Moreau-Yoshida envelope of any Lipschitz convex function, allowing us to perform dimension-free randomized smoothing. We demonstrate the potential of our estimator through four applications. First, we develop a method for minimizing the maximum of $N$ functions, improving on recent results and matching a lower bound up logarithmic factors. Second and third, we recover state-of-the-art rates for projection-efficient and gradient-efficient optimization using simple algorithms with a transparent analysis. Finally, we show that an improved version of our estimator would yield a nearly linear-time, optimal-utility, differentially-private non-smooth stochastic optimization method.
In this paper, we consider non-convex stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) problems that have many applications in machine learning. Although numerous studies have proposed stochastic algorithms for solving these problems, they are limited in two perspectives: (i) their sample complexities are high, which do not match the state-of-the-art result for non-convex stochastic optimization; (ii) their algorithms are tailored to problems with only one lower-level problem. When there are many lower-level problems, it could be prohibitive to process all these lower-level problems at each iteration. To address these limitations, this paper proposes fast randomized stochastic algorithms for non-convex SBO problems. First, we present a stochastic method for non-convex SBO with only one lower problem and establish its sample complexity of $O(1/epsilon^3)$ for finding an $epsilon$-stationary point under Lipschitz continuous conditions of stochastic oracles, matching the lower bound for stochastic smooth non-convex optimization. Second, we present a randomized stochastic method for non-convex SBO with $m>1$ lower level problems (multi-task SBO) by processing a constant number of lower problems at each iteration, and establish its sample complexity no worse than $O(m/epsilon^3)$, which could be a better complexity than that of simply processing all $m$ lower problems at each iteration. Lastly, we establish even faster convergence results for gradient-dominant functions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work considering multi-task SBO and developing state-of-the-art sample complexity results.
Projection-free optimization via different variants of the Frank-Wolfe (FW), a.k.a. Conditional Gradient method has become one of the cornerstones in optimization for machine learning since in many cases the linear minimization oracle is much cheaper to implement than projections and some sparsity needs to be preserved. In a number of applications, e.g. Poisson inverse problems or quantum state tomography, the loss is given by a self-concordant (SC) function having unbounded curvature, implying absence of theoretical guarantees for the existing FW methods. We use the theory of SC functions to provide a new adaptive step size for FW methods and prove global convergence rate O(1/k) after k iterations. If the problem admits a stronger local linear minimization oracle, we construct a novel FW method with linear convergence rate for SC functions.
In this paper, we propose some new proximal quasi-Newton methods with line search or without line search for a special class of nonsmooth multiobjective optimization problems, where each objective function is the sum of a twice continuously differentiable strongly convex function and a proper convex but not necessarily differentiable function. In these new proximal quasi-Newton methods, we approximate the Hessian matrices by using the well known BFGS, self-scaling BFGS, and the Huang BFGS method. We show that each accumulation point of the sequence generated by these new algorithms is a Pareto stationary point of the multiobjective optimization problem. In addition, we give their applications in robust multiobjective optimization, and we show that the subproblems of proximal quasi-Newton algorithms can be regarded as quadratic programming problems. Numerical experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.