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What kinds of functions are learnable from their satisfying assignments? Motivated by this simple question, we extend the framework of De, Diakonikolas, and Servedio [DDS15], which studied the learnability of probability distributions over…

This paper proposes a new family of algorithms for training neural networks (NNs). These are based on recent developments in the field of non-convex optimization, going under the general name of successive convex approximation (SCA)…

In this paper, we study a few challenging theoretical and numerical issues on the well known trust region policy optimization for deep reinforcement learning. The goal is to find a policy that maximizes the total expected reward when the…

Motivated by recent work on stochastic gradient descent methods, we develop two stochastic variants of greedy algorithms for possibly non-convex optimization problems with sparsity constraints. We prove linear convergence in expectation to…

An algorithm is said to be adaptive to a certain parameter (of the problem) if it does not need a priori knowledge of such a parameter but performs competitively to those that know it. This dissertation presents our work on adaptive…

This paper proposes the first-ever algorithmic framework for tuning hyper-parameters of stochastic optimization algorithm based on reinforcement learning. Hyper-parameters impose significant influences on the performance of stochastic…

We study a type of reverse (procurement) auction problems in the presence of budget constraints. The general algorithmic problem is to purchase a set of resources, which come at a cost, so as not to exceed a given budget and at the same…

We consider the problem of Cost-Aware Learning, where sampling different component functions of a finite-sum objective incurs different costs. The objective is to reach a target error while minimizing the total cost. First, we propose the…

We study the problem of approximating an unknown function $f:\mathbb{R}\to\mathbb{R}$ by a degree-$d$ polynomial using as few function evaluations as possible, where error is measured with respect to a probability distribution $\mu$.…

Monotone inclusions have a wide range of applications, including minimization, saddle-point, and equilibria problems. We introduce new stochastic algorithms, with or without variance reduction, to estimate a root of the expectation of…

Likelihood-free Bayesian inference algorithms are popular methods for calibrating the parameters of complex, stochastic models, required when the likelihood of the observed data is intractable. These algorithms characteristically rely…

This paper presents an algorithmic framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems using only stochastic function evaluations. We employ central finite-difference based gradient estimation methods to approximate the…

Submodular optimization generalizes many classic problems in combinatorial optimization and has recently found a wide range of applications in machine learning (e.g., feature engineering and active learning). For many large-scale…

Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a classical algorithm that has had since the early days a huge impact on signal processing, and nowadays on machine learning, due to the necessity to deal with a large amount of data observed with…

In the dynamic set cover problem, the input is a dynamic universe of elements and a fixed collection of sets. As elements are inserted or deleted, the goal is to efficiently maintain an approximate minimum set cover. While the past decade…

The level set estimation problem seeks to find all points in a domain ${\cal X}$ where the value of an unknown function $f:{\cal X}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ exceeds a threshold $\alpha$. The estimation is based on noisy function evaluations…

This paper introduces an iterative algorithm for training nonparametric additive models that enjoys favorable memory storage and computational requirements. The algorithm can be viewed as the functional counterpart of stochastic gradient…

The study presents a novel approach for stochastic nonlinear model updating in structural dynamics, employing a Bayesian framework integrated with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for parameter estimation by using an approximated…

Scalable algorithms of posterior approximation allow Bayesian nonparametrics such as Dirichlet process mixture to scale up to larger dataset at fractional cost. Recent algorithms, notably the stochastic variational inference performs local…

This paper considers a distributed adaptive optimization problem, where all agents only have access to their local cost functions with a common unknown parameter, whereas they mean to collaboratively estimate the true parameter and find the…