activity
20242026
collaborators

6 papers

math.OC2026

Negative Curvature Methods with High-Probability Complexity Guarantees for Stochastic Nonconvex Optimization

Albert S. Berahas, Raghu Bollapragada, Wanping Dong

This paper develops negative curvature methods for continuous nonlinear unconstrained optimization in stochastic settings, in which function, gradient, and Hessian information is a…

cs.LG2025

On the fast convergence of minibatch heavy ball momentum

Raghu Bollapragada, Tyler Chen, Rachel Ward

Simple stochastic momentum methods are widely used in machine learning optimization, but their good practical performance is at odds with an absence of theoretical guarantees of ac…

math.OC2025

Retrospective Approximation Sequential Quadratic Programming for Stochastic Optimization with General Deterministic Nonlinear Constraints

Albert S. Berahas, Raghu Bollapragada, Shagun Gupta

In this paper, we propose a framework based on the Retrospective Approximation (RA) paradigm to solve optimization problems with a stochastic objective function and general nonline…

math.OC2025

On the Convergence and Complexity of the Stochastic Central Finite-Difference Based Gradient Estimation Methods

Raghu Bollapragada, Cem Karamanli

This paper presents an algorithmic framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems using only stochastic function evaluations. We employ central finite-differe…

math.OC2024

Efficient Mathematical Programming Formulation and Algorithmic Framework for Optimal Camera Placement

Yash Kumar, Raghu Bollapragada, Benjamin D. Leibowicz

Optimal camera placement plays a crucial role in applications such as surveillance, environmental monitoring, and infrastructure inspection. Even highly abstracted versions of this…

math.OC2024

Exploiting Negative Curvature in Conjunction with Adaptive Sampling: Theoretical Results and a Practical Algorithm

Albert S. Berahas, Raghu Bollapragada, Wanping Dong

In this paper, we propose algorithms that exploit negative curvature for solving noisy nonlinear nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. We consider both deterministic and s…