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We study a class of nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems in which the objective is a sum of two functions: One function is the average of a large number of differentiable functions, while the other function is proper, lower…
Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are flexible tools for clustering dependent data coming from unknown populations, allowing nonparametric modelling of the population densities. Identifiability fails when the data is in fact independent and…
Structured distributions, i.e. distributions over combinatorial spaces, are commonly used to learn latent probabilistic representations from observed data. However, scaling these models is bottlenecked by the high computational and memory…
We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…
We consider a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) where the integrated continuous-time Markov chain can be observed at discrete time points perturbed by a Brownian motion. The aim is to derive a filter for the underlying continuous-time Markov chain.…
We address the problem of finding an optimal policy in a Markov decision process under a restricted policy class defined by the convex hull of a set of base policies. This problem is of great interest in applications in which a number of…
Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…
We propose novel randomized optimization methods for high-dimensional convex problems based on restrictions of variables to random subspaces. We consider oblivious and data-adaptive subspaces and study their approximation properties via…
In this paper, we consider low-rank approximations for the solutions to the stochastic Helmholtz equation with random coefficients. A Stochastic Galerkin finite element method is used for the discretization of the Helmholtz problem.…
We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs). For this purpose, some variant of Stochastic Mirror Descent is proposed for convex programming problems with Lipschitz-continuous…
We study stochastic nonconvex optimization under heavy-tailed noise. In this setting, the stochastic gradients only have bounded $p$-th central moment ($p$-BCM) for some $p \in (1,2]$. Building on the foundational work of Arjevani et al.…
Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ oracle complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary…
We employ constraints to control the parameter space of deep neural networks throughout training. The use of customized, appropriately designed constraints can reduce the vanishing/exploding gradients problem, improve smoothness of…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling of densities restricted to linearly constrained domains is an important task arising in Bayesian treatment of inverse problems in the natural sciences. While efficient algorithms for uniform polytope…
This paper deals with the problem of robust matrix completion -- retrieving a low-rank matrix and a sparse matrix from the compressed counterpart of their superposition. Though seemingly not an unresolved issue, we point out that the…
Gradient dominance property is a condition weaker than strong convexity, yet sufficiently ensures global convergence even in non-convex optimization. This property finds wide applications in machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL),…
We propose an approach to construction of robust non-Euclidean iterative algorithms for convex composite stochastic optimization based on truncation of stochastic gradients. For such algorithms, we establish sub-Gaussian confidence bounds…
Randomized sampling has recently been proven a highly efficient technique for computing approximate factorizations of matrices that have low numerical rank. This paper describes an extension of such techniques to a wider class of matrices…
We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…
In this work, we propose a first-order sampling method called the Metropolis-adjusted Preconditioned Langevin Algorithm for approximate sampling from a target distribution whose support is a proper convex subset of $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Our…