Related papers: The Proximal Robbins-Monro Method
Latent variable models have been playing a central role in psychometrics and related fields. In many modern applications, the inference based on latent variable models involves one or several of the following features: (1) the presence of…
This paper addresses second-order stochastic optimization for estimating the minimizer of a convex function written as an expectation. A direct recursive estimation technique for the inverse Hessian matrix using a Robbins-Monro procedure is…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
Demand for high-performance, robust, and safe autonomous systems has grown substantially in recent years. These objectives motivate the desire for efficient safety-theoretic reasoning that can be embedded in core decision-making tasks such…
Global optimization is a challenging problem, with plenty of algorithms displaying empirical success, but scarce theoretical backing. In this work, we propose a new theoretical framework called Proximal Basin Hopping (PBH), carefully…
Stochastic approximation algorithm is a useful technique which has been exploited successfully in probability theory and statistics for a long time. The step sizes used in stochastic approximation are generally taken to be deterministic and…
The paper proposes and justifies a new algorithm of the proximal Newton type to solve a broad class of nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems without strong convexity assumptions. Based on advanced notions and techniques of…
We adapt the quasi-monotone method from [2] for composite convex minimization in the stochastic setting. For the proposed numerical scheme we derive the optimal convergence rate in terms of the last iterate, rather than on average as it is…
Stochastic approximation methods play a central role in maximum likelihood estimation problems involving intractable likelihood functions, such as marginal likelihoods arising in problems with missing or incomplete data, and in parametric…
The question of how to incorporate curvature information in stochastic approximation methods is challenging. The direct application of classical quasi- Newton updating techniques for deterministic optimization leads to noisy curvature…
The Robbins-Siegmund theorem establishes the convergence of stochastic processes that are almost supermartingales and is one of the most commonly used approaches for analyzing stochastic iterative algorithms in stochastic approximation and…
In [19], a general, inexact, efficient proximal quasi-Newton algorithm for composite optimization problems has been proposed and a sublinear global convergence rate has been established. In this paper, we analyze the convergence properties…
Optimization problems with composite functions consist of an objective function which is the sum of a smooth and a (convex) nonsmooth term. This particular structure is exploited by the class of proximal gradient methods and some of their…
Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence…
We study a generalized framework for structured sparsity. It extends the well-known methods of Lasso and Group Lasso by incorporating additional constraints on the variables as part of a convex optimization problem. This framework provides…
Stochastic methods for minimizing a convex integral functional, as initiated by Robbins and Monro in the early 1950s, rely on the evaluation of a gradient (or subgradient if the function is not smooth) and moving in the corresponding…
We develop a family of reformulations of an arbitrary consistent linear system into a stochastic problem. The reformulations are governed by two user-defined parameters: a positive definite matrix defining a norm, and an arbitrary discrete…
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…
Approximations of optimization problems arise in computational procedures and sensitivity analysis. The resulting effect on solutions can be significant, with even small approximations of components of a problem translating into large…