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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is almost ubiquitously used for training non-convex optimization tasks. Recently, a hypothesis proposed by Keskar et al. [2017] that large batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers has received…

Clustering algorithms are fundamental tools across many fields, with density-based methods offering particular advantages in identifying arbitrarily shaped clusters and handling noise. However, their effectiveness is often limited by the…

A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The…

This paper intends to apply the sample-average-approximation (SAA) scheme to solve a system of stochastic equations (SSE), which has many applications in a variety of fields. The SAA is an effective paradigm to address risks and uncertainty…

We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…

Stochastic Proximal Gradient (SPG) methods have been widely used for solving optimization problems with a simple (possibly non-smooth) regularizer in machine learning and statistics. However, to the best of our knowledge no non-asymptotic…

Efficient analysis and simulation of multiscale stochastic systems of chemical kinetics is an ongoing area for research, and is the source of many theoretical and computational challenges. In this paper, we present a significant improvement…

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…

In this work, we study the asymptotic randomness of an algorithmic estimator of the saddle point of a globally convex-concave and locally strongly-convex strongly-concave objective. Specifically, we show that the averaged iterates of a…

Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…

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…

An increasing number of machine learning problems, such as robust or adversarial variants of existing algorithms, require minimizing a loss function that is itself defined as a maximum. Carrying a loop of stochastic gradient ascent (SGA)…

Bilevel optimization, the problem of minimizing a value function which involves the arg-minimum of another function, appears in many areas of machine learning. In a large scale empirical risk minimization setting where the number of samples…

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…

With the purpose of examining biased updates in variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods, we introduce SVAG, a SAG/SAGA-like method with adjustable bias. SVAG is analyzed in a cocoercive root-finding setting, a setting which yields the…

Distributed descent-based methods are an essential toolset to solving optimization problems in multi-agent system scenarios. Here the agents seek to optimize a global objective function through mutual cooperation. Oftentimes, cooperation is…

In this paper we introduce a class of novel distributed algorithms for solving stochastic big-data convex optimization problems over directed graphs. In the addressed set-up, the dimension of the decision variable can be extremely high and…

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…

We propose a new algorithm---Stochastic Proximal Langevin Algorithm (SPLA)---for sampling from a log concave distribution. Our method is a generalization of the Langevin algorithm to potentials expressed as the sum of one stochastic smooth…