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We consider stochastic dynamic programming problems with high-dimensional, discrete state-spaces and finite, discrete-time horizons that prohibit direct computation of the value function from a given Bellman equation for all states and time…
In a variety of problems originating in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, the loss function is defined by an expectation over a collection of random variables, which might be part of a probabilistic model or the external…
In stochastic contextual bandit (SCB) problems, an agent selects an action based on certain observed context to maximize the cumulative reward over iterations. Recently there have been a few studies using a deep neural network (DNN) to…
It has recently been shown that many of the existing quasi-Newton algorithms can be formulated as learning algorithms, capable of learning local models of the cost functions. Importantly, this understanding allows us to safely start…
Stochastic optimization algorithms update models with cheap per-iteration costs sequentially, which makes them amenable for large-scale data analysis. Such algorithms have been widely studied for structured sparse models where the sparsity…
This paper addresses the problem of optimizing partition functions in a stochastic learning setting. We propose a stochastic variant of the bound majorization algorithm that relies on upper-bounding the partition function with a quadratic…
In neural networks with binary activations and or binary weights the training by gradient descent is complicated as the model has piecewise constant response. We consider stochastic binary networks, obtained by adding noises in front of…
Submodular optimization is a fundamental problem with many applications in machine learning, often involving decision-making over datasets with sensitive attributes such as gender or age. In such settings, it is often desirable to produce a…
In this paper we study the adaptivity of submodular maximization. Adaptivity quantifies the number of sequential rounds that an algorithm makes when function evaluations can be executed in parallel. Adaptivity is a fundamental concept that…
We analyze the sketching approximability of constraint satisfaction problems on Boolean domains, where the constraints are balanced linear threshold functions applied to literals. In~particular, we explore the approximability of…
A deterministic approximation algorithm is presented for the maximization of non-monotone submodular functions over a ground set of size $n$ subject to cardinality constraint $k$; the algorithm is based upon the idea of interlacing two…
The ability to train Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with constraints is instrumental in improving the fairness of modern machine-learning models. Many algorithms have been analysed in recent years, and yet there is no standard, widely accepted…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic method for solving equality constrained optimization problems that utilizes predictive variance reduction. Specifically, we develop a method based on the sequential quadratic programming paradigm that…
In this paper, we consider the optimization problem \scpl (\scp), which is to find a minimum cost subset of a ground set $U$ such that the value of a submodular function $f$ is above a threshold $\tau$. In contrast to most existing work on…
In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…
We consider the problem of maximizing non-negative non-decreasing set functions. Although most of the recent work focus on exploiting submodularity, it turns out that several objectives we encounter in practice are not submodular.…
We demonstrate that from an algorithm guaranteeing an approximation factor for the ratio of submodular (RS) optimization problem, we can build another algorithm having a different kind of approximation guarantee -- weaker than the classical…
In several applications of automatic diagnosis and active learning a central problem is the evaluation of a discrete function by adaptively querying the values of its variables until the values read uniquely determine the value of the…
Considering the set cover problem, by modifying the approach that gives a logarithmic approximation guarantee for the greedy algorithm, we obtain an estimation of the greedy algorithm's accuracy for a particular input. We compare the…
We develop and analyze stochastic approximation algorithms for solving nested compositional bi-level optimization problems. These problems involve a nested composition of $T$ potentially non-convex smooth functions in the upper-level, and a…