Related papers: Algorithms for stochastic optimization with functi…
Based on the stochastic maximum principle for the partially coupled forward-backward stochastic control system (FBSCS for short), a modified method of successive approximations (MSA for short) is established for stochastic recursive optimal…
Optimal stopping is the problem of determining when to stop a stochastic system in order to maximize reward, which is of practical importance in domains such as finance, operations management and healthcare. Existing methods for…
Principal component analysis (PCA) has been widely applied to dimensionality reduction and data pre-processing for different applications in engineering, biology and social science. Classical PCA and its variants seek for linear projections…
In this paper, we study high-dimensional sparse Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA) and aim to establish the optimal convergence rates for the classification error. Minimax lower bounds are established to demonstrate the necessity of…
A sequential quadratic programming method is designed for solving general smooth nonlinear stochastic optimization problems subject to expectation equality constraints. We consider the setting where the objective and constraint function…
A broad class of convex optimization problems can be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP), minimization of a convex function over the positive-semidefinite cone subject to some affine constraints. The majority of classical SDP solvers…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems with weakly convex objective and constraint functions. We propose Prox-PEP, a proximal method equipped with quadratic subproblems. To handle nonlinear equality constraints, we employ an…
We consider minimizing an objective function subject to constraints defined by the intersection of lower-level sets of convex functions. We study two cases: (i) strongly convex and Lipschitz-smooth objective function and (ii) convex but…
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…
Combinatorial optimization problems can be solved by heuristic algorithms such as simulated annealing (SA) which aims to find the optimal solution within a large search space through thermal fluctuations. The algorithm generates new…
A new stochastic primal--dual algorithm for solving a composite optimization problem is proposed. It is assumed that all the functions/operators that enter the optimization problem are given as statistical expectations. These expectations…
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…
This paper studies decentralized convex-concave minimax optimization problems of the form $\min_x\max_y f(x,y) \triangleq\frac{1}{m}\sum_{i=1}^m f_i(x,y)$, where $m$ is the number of agents and each local function can be written as…
The accelerated proximal point algorithm (APPA), also known as "Catalyst", is a well-established reduction from convex optimization to approximate proximal point computation (i.e., regularized minimization). This reduction is conceptually…
This paper explores adaptive variance reduction methods for stochastic optimization based on the STORM technique. Existing adaptive extensions of STORM rely on strong assumptions like bounded gradients and bounded function values, or suffer…
Optimization problems involving sequential decisions in a stochastic environment were studied in Stochastic Programming (SP), Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In this paper we mainly concentrate on SP…
We introduce the online stochastic Convex Programming (CP) problem, a very general version of stochastic online problems which allows arbitrary concave objectives and convex feasibility constraints. Many well-studied problems like online…
This article describes a novel approach to chance-constrained programming based on the sample average approximation (SAA) method. Recent work focuses on heuristic approximations to the SAA problem and we introduce a novel approach which…
We study computational and statistical consequences of problem geometry in stochastic and online optimization. By focusing on constraint set and gradient geometry, we characterize the problem families for which stochastic- and…
We consider maximization of stochastic monotone continuous submodular functions (CSF) with a diminishing return property. Existing algorithms only guarantee the performance \textit{in expectation}, and do not bound the probability of…