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Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in system optimization problems when only noisy measurements of the system are available. This paper studies two types of SA algorithms in a multivariate Kiefer-Wolfowitz setting:…
This work considers stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function values can only be computed by a blackbox corrupted by some random noise following an unknown distribution. The proposed method is based on sequential…
We introduce deterministic perturbation schemes for the recently proposed random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA) [17], and propose new first-order and second-order algorithms. In the latter case, these are the first second-order…
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) is vital in solving complex optimization problems where only noisy function evaluations are available through an oracle. Within this domain, DFO via finite difference (FD) approximation has emerged as a…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
We present novel algorithms for simulation optimization using random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA). These include first-order (gradient) as well as second-order (Newton) schemes. We incorporate both continuous-valued as well as…
Discrete stochastic optimization considers the problem of minimizing (or maximizing) loss functions defined on discrete sets, where only noisy measurements of the loss functions are available. The discrete stochastic optimization problem is…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…
First-order methods for stochastic optimization have undeniable relevance, in part due to their pivotal role in machine learning. Variance reduction for these algorithms has become an important research topic. In contrast to common…
We develop a first-order (pseudo-)gradient approach for optimizing functions over the stationary distribution of discrete-time Markov chains (DTMC). We give insights into why solving this optimization problem is challenging and show how…
Many machine learning tasks can be formulated as a stochastic compositional optimization (SCO) problem such as reinforcement learning, AUC maximization, and meta-learning, where the objective function involves a nested composition…
This paper considers convex optimization problems where nodes of a network have access to summands of a global objective. Each of these local objectives is further assumed to be an average of a finite set of functions. The motivation for…
We develop universal gradient methods for Stochastic Convex Optimization (SCO). Our algorithms automatically adapt not only to the oracle's noise but also to the H\"older smoothness of the objective function without a priori knowledge of…
We consider solving nonlinear optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints, assuming that only zero-order information is available for both the objective and constraints, and that the objective is…
With the rapid development of distributed optimization (DO) theory, the distributed stochastic gradient methods (DSGMs) occupy an important position. Although the theory of different DSGMs has been widely established, the main-stream…
Gradient-based methods are well-suited for derivative-free optimization (DFO), where finite-difference (FD) estimates are commonly used as gradient surrogates. Traditional stochastic approximation methods, such as Kiefer-Wolfowitz (KW) and…
Perturbing a deterministic $n$-dimensional matrix with small Gaussian noise is a cornerstone of smoothed analysis of algorithms [Spielman and Teng, JACM 2004], as it reduces the condition number of the input to $O(n)$, and with it the…
We study a fixed step-size noisy distributed gradient descent algorithm for solving optimization problems in which the objective is a finite sum of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Random perturbations are introduced to the…
Gaussian smoothing (GS) is a derivative-free optimization (DFO) algorithm that estimates the gradient of an objective using perturbations of the current parameters sampled from a standard normal distribution. We generalize it to sampling…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…