Publications by Ali Kavis | EPFL Graph Search

Universal Gradient Methods for Stochastic Convex Optimization

Volkan Cevher, Ali Kavis, Yongtao Wu, Kimon Antonakopoulos

We develop universal gradient methods for Stochastic Convex Optimization (SCO). Our algorithms automatically adapt not only to the oracle's noise but also to the Hölder smoothness of the objective function without a priori knowledge of the particular setti ...

2024

Alternation makes the adversary weaker in two-player games

Volkan Cevher, Ali Kavis, Luca Viano, Efstratios Panteleimon Skoulakis

Motivated by alternating game-play in two-player games, we study an altenating variant of the Online Linear Optimization (OLO). In alternating OLO, a learner at each round t ∈[n] selects a vector xt and then an adversary selects a cost-vector ct ∈[−1,1]n. ...

2023

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

High Probability Bounds for a Class of Nonconvex Algorithms with AdaGrad Stepsize

Volkan Cevher, Ali Kavis

In this paper, we propose a new, simplified high probability analysis of AdaGrad for smooth, non-convex problems. More specifically, we focus on a particular accelerated gradient (AGD) template (Lan, 2020) through which we recover the original AdaGrad and ...

2022

Adaptive Stochastic Variance Reduction for Non-convex Finite-Sum Minimization

Volkan Cevher, Ali Kavis, Leello Tadesse Dadi, Efstratios Panteleimon Skoulakis, Kimon Antonakopoulos

We propose an adaptive variance-reduction method, called AdaSpider, for minimization of L-smooth, non-convex functions with a finite-sum structure. In essence, AdaSpider combines an AdaGrad-inspired [Duchi et al., 2011, McMahan & Streeter, 2010], but a fai ...

2022

Sifting through the Noise: Universal First-Order Methods for Stochastic Variational Inequalities

Volkan Cevher, Ali Kavis, Thomas Michaelsen Pethick, Kimon Antonakopoulos

We examine a flexible algorithmic framework for solving monotone variational inequalities in the presence of randomness and uncertainty. The proposed template encompasses a wide range of popular first-order methods, including dual averaging, dual extrapola ...

2021

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

Double-Loop Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm

Armin Eftekhari, Volkan Cevher, Paul Thierry Yves Rolland, Ali Kavis

A well-known first-order method for sampling from log-concave probability distributions is the Unadjusted Langevin Algorithm (ULA). This work proposes a new annealing step-size schedule for ULA, which allows to prove new convergence guarantees for sampling ...

2020

On the Almost Sure Convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent in Non-Convex Problems

Volkan Cevher, Ali Kavis, Shaul Nadav Hallak

This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm’s convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and converges with prob ...

2020

Efficient learning of smooth probability functions from Bernoulli tests with guarantees

Volkan Cevher, Paul Thierry Yves Rolland, Ali Kavis

We study the fundamental problem of learning an unknown, smooth probability function via pointwise Bernoulli tests. We provide a scalable algorithm for efficiently solving this problem with rigorous guarantees. In particular, we prove the convergence rate ...

2019

UniXGrad: A Universal, Adaptive Algorithm with Optimal Guarantees for Constrained Optimization

Volkan Cevher, Ali Kavis

We propose a novel adaptive, accelerated algorithm for the stochastic constrained convex optimization setting. Our method, which is inspired by the Mirror-Prox method, \emph{simultaneously} achieves the optimal rates for smooth/non-smooth problems with eit ...

La Jolla2019

Mirrored Langevin Dynamics

Volkan Cevher, Paul Thierry Yves Rolland, Ya-Ping Hsieh, Ali Kavis

We consider the problem of sampling from constrained distributions, which has posed significant challenges to both non-asymptotic analysis and algorithmic design. We propose a unified framework, which is inspired by the classical mirror descent, to derive ...

2018