Publications related to Linear Speedup In Saddle-Point Escape For Decentralized Non-Convex Optimization

BENIGN LANDSCAPES OF LOW-DIMENSIONAL RELAXATIONS FOR ORTHOGONAL SYNCHRONIZATION ON GENERAL GRAPHS

Orthogonal group synchronization is the problem of estimating n elements Z(1),& mldr;,Z(n) from the rxr orthogonal group given some relative measurements R-ij approximate to Z(i)Z(j)(-1). The least-squares formulation is nonconvex. To avoid its local minim ...

Siam Publications2024

The effect of smooth parametrizations on nonconvex optimization landscapes

Nicolas Boumal

We develop new tools to study landscapes in nonconvex optimization. Given one optimization problem, we pair it with another by smoothly parametrizing the domain. This is either for practical purposes (e.g., to use smooth optimization algorithms with good g ...

Springer Heidelberg2024

Augmented Lagrangian Methods for Provable and Scalable Machine Learning

Mehmet Fatih Sahin

Non-convex constrained optimization problems have become a powerful framework for modeling a wide range of machine learning problems, with applications in k-means clustering, large- scale semidefinite programs (SDPs), and various other tasks. As the perfor ...

EPFL2023

Safe Zeroth-Order Convex Optimization Using Quadratic Local Approximations

Baiwei Guo, Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate, Yuning Jiang, Maryam Kamgarpour

We address black-box convex optimization problems, where the objective and constraint functions are not explicitly known but can be sampled within the feasible set. The challenge is thus to generate a sequence of feasible points converging towards an optim ...

IEEE2023

Universal and adaptive methods for robust stochastic optimization

Ali Kavis

Within the context of contemporary machine learning problems, efficiency of optimization process depends on the properties of the model and the nature of the data available, which poses a significant problem as the complexity of either increases ad infinit ...

EPFL2023

End-to-End Learning for Stochastic Optimization: A Bayesian Perspective

Daniel Kuhn, Yves Rychener, Tobias Sutter

We develop a principled approach to end-to-end learning in stochastic optimization. First, we show that the standard end-to-end learning algorithm admits a Bayesian interpretation and trains a posterior Bayes action map. Building on the insights of this an ...

2023

Data-Driven Control and Optimization under Noisy and Uncertain Conditions

Baiwei Guo

Control systems operating in real-world environments often face disturbances arising from measurement noise and model mismatch. These factors can significantly impact the perfor- mance and safety of the system. In this thesis, we aim to leverage data to de ...

EPFL2023

A comprehensive review of digital twin-part 2: roles of uncertainty quantification and optimization, a battery digital twin, and perspectives

Sayan Ghosh, Chao Hu, Olga Fink

As an emerging technology in the era of Industry 4.0, digital twin is gaining unprecedented attention because of its promise to further optimize process design, quality control, health monitoring, decision- and policy-making, and more, by comprehensively m ...

SPRINGER2023

Stochastic Second-Order Methods Improve Best-Known Sample Complexity of SGD for Gradient-Dominated Function

Patrick Thiran, Saber Salehkaleybar, Negar Kiyavash

We study the performance of Stochastic Cubic Regularized Newton (SCRN) on a class of functions satisfying gradient dominance property with

1\le\alpha\le2

which holds in a wide range of applications in machine learning and signal processing. This conditio ...

NeurIPS2022

Finding stationary points on bounded-rank matrices: a geometric hurdle and a smooth remedy

Nicolas Boumal

We consider the problem of provably finding a stationary point of a smooth function to be minimized on the variety of bounded-rank matrices. This turns out to be unexpectedly delicate. We trace the difficulty back to a geometric obstacle: On a nonsmooth se ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2022

Learning of Continuous and Piecewise-Linear Functions With Hessian Total-Variation Regularization

Michaël Unser, Joaquim Gonçalves Garcia Barreto Campos, Shayan Aziznejad

We develop a novel 2D functional learning framework that employs a sparsity-promoting regularization based on second-order derivatives. Motivated by the nature of the regularizer, we restrict the search space to the span of piecewise-linear box splines shi ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

Optimal Combination Policies For Adaptive Social Learning

Stefan Vlaski, Virginia Bordignon, Ping Hu

This paper investigates the effect of combination policies on the performance of adaptive social learning in non-stationary environments. By analyzing the relation between the error probability and the underlying graph topology, we prove that in the slow a ...

IEEE2022

Neural System Level Synthesis: Learning over All Stabilizing Policies for Nonlinear Systems

Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate, Clara Lucía Galimberti, Luca Furieri

We address the problem of designing stabilizing control policies for nonlinear systems in discrete-time, while minimizing an arbitrary cost function. When the system is linear and the cost is convex, the System Level Synthesis (SLS) approach offers an effe ...

IEEE2022

STORM+: Fully Adaptive SGD with Momentum for Nonconvex Optimization

Volkan Cevher, Ali Kavis

In this work we investigate stochastic non-convex optimization problems wherethe objective is an expectation over smooth loss functions, and the goal is to find an approximate stationary point. The most popular approach to handling such problems is varianc ...

2021

Distributed Learning in Non-Convex Environments-Part II: Polynomial Escape From Saddle-Points

Ali H. Sayed, Stefan Vlaski

The diffusion strategy for distributed learning from streaming data employs local stochastic gradient updates along with exchange of iterates over neighborhoods. In Part I [3] of this work we established that agents cluster around a network centroid and pr ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2021

Logical Team Q-learning: An approach towards factored policies in cooperative MARL

Ali H. Sayed, Lucas Cesar Eduardo Cassano

We address the challenge of learning factored policies in cooperative MARL scenarios. In particular, we consider the situation in which a team of agents collaborates to optimize a common cost. The goal is to obtain factored policies that determine the indi ...

MICROTOME PUBLISHING2021

Optimization methods for collaborative learning

Sai Praneeth Reddy Karimireddy

A traditional machine learning pipeline involves collecting massive amounts of data centrally on a server and training models to fit the data. However, increasing concerns about the privacy and security of user's data, combined with the sheer growth in the ...

EPFL2021

Competing Adaptive Networks

Ali H. Sayed, Stefan Vlaski

Adaptive networks have the capability to pursue solutions of global stochastic optimization problems by relying only local interactions within neighborhoods. The diffusion of information through repeated interactions allows for globally optimal behavior, w ...

IEEE2021

Gramian-Based Adaptive Combination Policies For Diffusion Learning Over Networks

Ali H. Sayed, Stefan Vlaski, Yigit Efe Erginbas

This paper presents an adaptive combination strategy for distributed learning over diffusion networks. Since learning relies on the collaborative processing of the stochastic information at the dispersed agents, the overall performance can be improved by d ...

IEEE2021

Optimization Methods for Control: From Embedded Programmable Hardware to Data-Driven Process Optimization

Harsh Ambarishkumar Shukla

The research community has been making significant progress in hardware implementation, numerical computing and algorithm development for optimization-based control. However, there are two key challenges that still have to be overcome for optimization-base ...

EPFL2021