Related papers: Stochastic Optimization with Bandit Sampling

The performance of a machine learning system is usually evaluated by using i.i.d.\ observations with true labels. However, acquiring ground truth labels is expensive, while obtaining unlabeled samples may be cheaper. Stratified sampling can…

Machine learning, especially deep neural networks, has been rapidly developed in fields including computer vision, speech recognition and reinforcement learning. Although Mini-batch SGD is one of the most popular stochastic optimization…

In this paper, a general stochastic optimization procedure is studied, unifying several variants of the stochastic gradient descent such as, among others, the stochastic heavy ball method, the Stochastic Nesterov Accelerated Gradient…

The celebrated Monte Carlo method estimates an expensive-to-compute quantity by random sampling. Bandit-based Monte Carlo optimization is a general technique for computing the minimum of many such expensive-to-compute quantities by adaptive…

We propose a stochastic variance reduced optimization algorithm for solving sparse learning problems with cardinality constraints. Sufficient conditions are provided, under which the proposed algorithm enjoys strong linear convergence…

We study the non-stationary stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward statistics of each arm may change several times during the course of learning. The performance of a learning algorithm is evaluated in terms of their…

We consider the problem of identifying the best arm in stochastic Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs) using a fixed sampling budget. Characterizing the minimal instance-specific error probability for this problem constitutes one of the important…

Thompson sampling (TS) has optimal regret and excellent empirical performance in multi-armed bandit problems. Yet, in Bayesian optimization, TS underperforms popular acquisition functions (e.g., EI, UCB). TS samples arms according to the…

We derive a stochastic gradient algorithm for semidefinite optimization using randomization techniques. The algorithm uses subsampling to reduce the computational cost of each iteration and the subsampling ratio explicitly controls…

We study the problem of learning 'good' interventions in a stochastic environment modeled by its underlying causal graph. Good interventions refer to interventions that maximize rewards. Specifically, we consider the setting of a…

We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…

This paper considers a class of constrained stochastic composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a certain non-differentiable (but…

The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the non-stationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures…

We introduce data structures for solving robust regression through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by sampling gradients with probability proportional to their norm, i.e., importance sampling. Although SGD is widely used for large scale…

There are several applications of stochastic optimization where one can benefit from a robust estimate of the gradient. For example, domains such as distributed learning with corrupted nodes, the presence of large outliers in the training…

In this paper, we propose a sampling algorithm based on state-of-the-art statistical machine learning techniques to obtain conditional nonlinear optimal perturbations (CNOPs), which is different from traditional (deterministic) optimization…

This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…

This paper reviews the gradient sampling methodology for solving nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems. An intuitively straightforward gradient sampling algorithm is stated and its convergence properties are summarized. Throughout this…

We study the stochastic Budgeted Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where a player chooses from $K$ arms with unknown expected rewards and costs. The goal is to maximize the total reward under a budget constraint. A player thus seeks to…

Distributed stochastic optimization has drawn great attention recently due to its effectiveness in solving large-scale machine learning problems. Though numerous algorithms have been proposed and successfully applied to general practical…