Related papers: On Smoothing, Regularization and Averaging in Stoc…
We propose dynamic sampled stochastic approximation (SA) methods for stochastic optimization with a heavy-tailed distribution (with finite 2nd moment). The objective is the sum of a smooth convex function with a convex regularizer.…
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…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…
In this work we explore the fundamental structure-adaptiveness of state of the art randomized first order algorithms on regularized empirical risk minimization tasks, where the solution has intrinsic low-dimensional structure (such as…
Sample average approximation (SAA) is a widely popular approach to data-driven decision-making under uncertainty. Under mild assumptions, SAA is both tractable and enjoys strong asymptotic performance guarantees. Similar guarantees,…
Recently, the stochastic asymptotical regularization (SAR) has been developed in (\emph{Inverse Problems}, 39: 015007, 2023) for the uncertainty quantification of the stable approximate solution of linear ill-posed inverse problems. In this…
Averaging, or smoothing, is a fundamental approach to obtain stable, de-noised estimates from noisy observations. In certain scenarios, observations made along trajectories of random dynamical systems are of particular interest. One popular…
The standard theory of stochastic approximation (SA) is extended to the case when the constraint set is a Riemannian manifold. Specifically, the standard ODE method for analyzing SA schemes is extended to iterations constrained to stay on a…
Two-time-scale stochastic approximation (SA) is an algorithm with coupled iterations which has found broad applications in reinforcement learning, optimization and game control. In this work, we derive mean squared error bounds for…
Stochastic variance reduced optimization methods are known to be globally convergent while they suffer from slow local convergence, especially when moderate or high accuracy is needed. To alleviate this problem, we propose an optimization…
The classical Method of Successive Approximations (MSA) is an iterative method for solving stochastic control problems and is derived from Pontryagin's optimality principle. It is known that the MSA may fail to converge. Using careful…
In this work, we conduct a systematic study of stochastic saddle point problems (SSP) and stochastic variational inequalities (SVI) under the constraint of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy (DP) in both Euclidean and non-Euclidean…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a popular approach for solving fixed-point equations where the information is corrupted by noise. In this paper, we consider an SA involving a contraction mapping with respect to an arbitrary norm, and show…
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…
We study the problem of minimizing the average of a very large number of smooth functions, which is of key importance in training supervised learning models. One of the most celebrated methods in this context is the SAGA algorithm. Despite…
We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…
The approximation ratio has become one of the dominant measures in mechanism design problems. In light of analysis of algorithms, we define the \emph{smoothed approximation ratio} to compare the performance of the optimal mechanism and a…
The sliding window model generalizes the standard streaming model and often performs better in applications where recent data is more important or more accurate than data that arrived prior to a certain time. We study the problem of…
In this paper we revisit a fundamental technical issue within the theory of stochastic approximation (SA) in a Markovian framework, first proposed in the book by Djereveckii and Fradkov (1981), and further developed in much detail in the…