Global optimization of expensive, potentially gradient-free functions has long been a critical component of many complex problems in science and engineering.

Functional constrained optimization (FCO) has emerged as a powerful tool for solving various machine learning problems. However, with the rapid increase in applications of neural networks in recent years, it has become apparent that both the objective and constraints often involve nonconvex functions, which poses significant challenges in obtaining high-quality solutions. In this work, we focus on a class of nonconvex FCO problems with nonconvex constraints, where the two optimization variables are nonlinearly coupled in the inequality constraint. Leveraging the primal-dual optimization framework, we propose a smoothed first-order Lagrangian method (SLM) for solving this class of problems. We establish the theoretical convergence guarantees of SLM to the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solutions through quantifying dual error bounds. By establishing connections between this structured FCO and equilibrium-constrained nonconvex problems (also known as bilevel optimization), we apply the proposed SLM to tackle bilevel optimization oriented problems where the lower-level problem is nonconvex. Numerical results obtained from both toy examples and hyper-data cleaning problems demonstrate the superiority of SLM compared to benchmark methods.

Once closed-form expressions for these Jacobians are derived, it remains to substitute those expressions into (16). The following identity (often termed the "vec" rule) will To depict the spatial topographies of the latent components measured on the EEG and fMRI analyses, the "forward-model" [ The results of the comparison are shown in Fig S1, where it is clear that the signal fidelity of the GCs (right panel) significantly exceeds those yielded by PCA (left) and ICA (middle). GCA is only able to recover sources with temporal dependencies (i.e., s Both the single electrodes and Granger components exhibit two pronounced peaks in the spectra: one near 2 Hz ("delta" Fig S3 shows the corresponding result for the left motor imagery condition. EEG motor imagery dataset described in the main text. For each technique, the first 6 components are presented.

Here the concept of Granger causality is employed to propose a new criterion for unsupervised learning that is appropriate in the case of temporally-dependent source signals. The basic idea is to identify two projections of a multivariate time series such that the Granger causality among the resulting pair of components is maximized.