activity
20242026
collaborators

10 papers

stat.ML2026

Small Gradient Norm Regret for Online Convex Optimization

Wenzhi Gao, Chang He, Madeleine Udell

This paper introduces a new problem-dependent regret measure for online convex optimization with smooth losses. The notion, which we call the regret, depends on the cumul…

math.OC2026

A Smooth Approximation Framework for Weakly Convex Optimization

Qi Deng, Wenzhi Gao

Standard complexity analyses for weakly convex optimization rely on the Moreau envelope technique proposed by Davis and Drusvyatskiy (2019). The main insight is that nonsmooth algo…

math.OC2025

New Results on the Polyak Stepsize: Tight Convergence Analysis and Universal Function Classes

Chang He, Wenzhi Gao, Bo Jiang +2

In this paper, we revisit a classical adaptive stepsize strategy for gradient descent: the Polyak stepsize (PolyakGD), originally proposed in Polyak (1969). We study the convergenc…

math.OC2025

Gradient Methods with Online Scaling Part II. Practical Aspects

Ya-Chi Chu, Wenzhi Gao, Yinyu Ye +1

Part I of this work [Gao25] establishes online scaled gradient methods (OSGM), a framework that utilizes online convex optimization to adapt stepsizes in gradient methods. This pap…

math.OC2025

Gradient Methods with Online Scaling Part I. Theoretical Foundations

Wenzhi Gao, Ya-Chi Chu, Yinyu Ye +1

This paper establishes the theoretical foundations of the online scaled gradient methods (OSGM), a framework that utilizes online learning to adapt stepsizes and provably accelerat…

math.OC2025

Provable and Practical Online Learning Rate Adaptation with Hypergradient Descent

Ya-Chi Chu, Wenzhi Gao, Yinyu Ye +1

This paper investigates the convergence properties of the hypergradient descent method (HDM), a 25-year-old heuristic originally proposed for adaptive stepsize selection in stochas…