Related papers: On variance reduction for stochastic smooth convex…
Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…
In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a method for finding the root of an operator perturbed by noise. There is a rich literature establishing the asymptotic normality of rescaled SA iterates under fairly mild conditions. However, these…
This paper investigates the robust optimal control of sampled-data stochastic systems with multiplicative noise and distributional ambiguity. We consider a class of discrete-time optimal control problems where the controller \emph{jointly}…
We present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…
Optimization under heavy-tailed noise has become popular recently, since it better fits many modern machine learning tasks, as captured by empirical observations. Concretely, instead of a finite second moment on gradient noise, a bounded…
In this paper we first study a smooth optimization approach for solving a class of nonsmooth strictly concave maximization problems whose objective functions admit smooth convex minimization reformulations. In particular, we apply…
We consider a composite convex minimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization, which often arises in machine learning. We propose two new stochastic gradient methods that are based on stochastic dual averaging…
We consider the nonsmooth convex composition optimization problem where the objective is a composition of two finite-sum functions and analyze stochastic compositional variance reduced gradient (SCVRG) methods for them. SCVRG and its…
Two-timescale Stochastic Approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Their iterates have two parts that are updated using distinct stepsizes. In this work, we develop a novel recipe for their finite sample…
We propose an adaptive proximal gradient method for minimizing the sum of two functions, where one is a simple convex function, and the other belongs to one of the three classes: nonconvex smooth, convex nonsmooth, or convex smooth. The key…
We consider a regularized expected reward optimization problem in the non-oblivious setting that covers many existing problems in reinforcement learning (RL). In order to solve such an optimization problem, we apply and analyze the…
Stochastic composition optimization draws much attention recently and has been successful in many emerging applications of machine learning, statistical analysis, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we focus on the composition…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
Multi-time-scale stochastic approximation is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of a set of $N$ coupled operators given their noisy samples. It has been observed that due to the coupling between the decision variables and…
We study the problem of minimizing a strongly convex, smooth function when we have noisy estimates of its gradient. We propose a novel multistage accelerated algorithm that is universally optimal in the sense that it achieves the optimal…
In this paper, we provide novel optimal (or near optimal) convergence rates for a clipped version of the stochastic subgradient method. We consider nonsmooth convex problems over possibly unbounded domains, under heavy-tailed noise that…
Gradient clipping is a standard training technique used in deep learning applications such as large-scale language modeling to mitigate exploding gradients. Recent experimental studies have demonstrated a fairly special behavior in the…
In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…
A fully stochastic second-order adaptive-regularization method for unconstrained nonconvex optimization is presented which never computes the objective-function value, but yet achieves the optimal $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ complexity…