Federated Learning on Riemannian Manifolds

Federated learning (FL) has found many important applications in smart-phone-APP based machine learning applications. Although many algorithms have been studied for FL, to the best of our knowledge, algorithms for FL with nonconvex constraints have not been studied. This paper studies FL over Riemannian manifolds, which finds important applications such as federated PCA and federated … Read more

Decentralized Bilevel Optimization

Bilevel optimization has been successfully applied to many important machine learning problems. Algorithms for solving bilevel optimization have been studied under various settings. In this paper, we study the nonconvex-strongly-convex bilevel optimization under a decentralized setting. We design decentralized algorithms for both deterministic and stochastic bilevel optimization problems. Moreover, we analyze the convergence rates of … Read more

Preconditioned Gradient Descent for Overparameterized Nonconvex Burer–Monteiro Factorization with Global Optimality Certification

We consider using gradient descent to minimize the nonconvex function $f(X)=\phi(XX^{T})$ over an $n\times r$ factor matrix $X$, in which $\phi$ is an underlying smooth convex cost function defined over $n\times n$ matrices. While only a second-order stationary point $X$ can be provably found in reasonable time, if $X$ is additionally \emph{rank deficient}, then its … Read more

Accelerated first-order methods for a class of semidefinite programs

This paper introduces a new storage-optimal first-order method (FOM), CertSDP, for solving a special class of semidefinite programs (SDPs) to high accuracy. The class of SDPs that we consider, the exact QMP-like SDPs , is characterized by low-rank solutions, a priori knowledge of the restriction of the SDP solution to a small subspace, and standard … Read more

Metrizing Fairness

We study supervised learning problems for predicting properties of individuals who belong to one of two demographic groups, and we seek predictors that are fair according to statistical parity. This means that the distributions of the predictions within the two groups should be close with respect to the Kolmogorov distance, and fairness is achieved by … Read more

Complexity-optimal and Parameter-free First-order Methods for Finding Stationary Points of Composite Optimization Problems

This paper develops and analyzes an accelerated proximal descent method for finding stationary points of nonconvex composite optimization problems. The objective function is of the form f+h where h is a proper closed convex function, f is a differentiable function on the domain of h, and ∇f is Lipschitz continuous on the domain of h. … Read more

A Reduced Jacobian Scheme with Full Convergence for Multicriteria Optimization

In this paper, we propose a variant of the reduced Jacobian method (RJM) introduced by El Maghri and Elboulqe in [JOTA, 179 (2018) 917–943] for multicriteria optimization under linear constraints. Motivation is that, contrarily to RJM which has only global convergence to Pareto KKT-stationary points in the classical sense of accumulation points, this new variant … Read more

On complexity constants of linear and quadratic models for derivative-free trust-region algorithms

Complexity analysis has become an important tool in the convergence analysis of optimization algorithms. For derivative-free optimization algorithms, it is not different. Interestingly, several constants that appear when developing complexity results hide the dimensions of the problem. This work organizes several results in literature about bounds that appear in derivative-free trust-region algorithms based on linear … Read more

A Constraint Dissolving Approach for Nonsmooth Optimization over the Stiefel Manifold

This paper focus on the minimization of a possibly nonsmooth objective function over the Stiefel manifold. The existing approaches either lack efficiency or can only tackle prox-friendly objective functions. We propose a constraint dissolving function named NCDF and show that it has the same first-order stationary points and local minimizers as the original problem in … Read more

First- and Second-Order High Probability Complexity Bounds for Trust-Region Methods with Noisy Oracles

In this paper, we present convergence guarantees for a modified trust-region method designed for minimizing objective functions whose value is computed with noise and for which gradient and Hessian estimates are inexact and possibly random. In order to account for the noise, the method utilizes a relaxed step acceptance criterion and a cautious trust-region radius … Read more