Related papers: Adaptive Sampling Strategies for Stochastic Optimi…

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

The training of modern machine learning models often consists in solving high-dimensional non-convex optimisation problems that are subject to large-scale data. In this context, momentum-based stochastic optimisation algorithms have become…

Variance reduction is a family of powerful mechanisms for stochastic optimization that appears to be helpful in many machine learning tasks. It is based on estimating the exact gradient with some recursive sequences. Previously, many papers…

Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…

Stochastic gradient methods are among the most widely used algorithms for large-scale optimization and machine learning. A key technique for improving the statistical efficiency and stability of these methods is the use of averaging schemes…

Models incorporating uncertain inputs, such as random forces or material parameters, have been of increasing interest in PDE-constrained optimization. In this paper, we focus on the efficient numerical minimization of a convex and smooth…

For finite-dimensional problems, stochastic approximation methods have long been used to solve stochastic optimization problems. Their application to infinite-dimensional problems is less understood, particularly for nonconvex objectives.…

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 explore the performance of sample average approximation in comparison with several other methods for stochastic optimization when there is information available on the underlying true probability distribution. The methods we evaluate are…

We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular optimization method which has been applied to many important machine learning tasks such as Support Vector Machines and Deep Neural Networks. In order to parallelize SGD, minibatch training is…

We develop the method of stochastic modified equations (SME), in which stochastic gradient algorithms are approximated in the weak sense by continuous-time stochastic differential equations. We exploit the continuous formulation together…

We revisit the sample average approximation (SAA) approach for non-convex stochastic programming. We show that applying the SAA approach to problems with expected value equality constraints does not necessarily result in asymptotic…

We introduce a statistical physics inspired supervised machine learning algorithm for classification and regression problems. The method is based on the invariances or stability of predicted results when known data is represented as…

Large-scale supervised classification algorithms, especially those based on deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), require vast amounts of training data to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Decreasing this data requirement would…

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

In this paper, a modification to the Gradient Sampling (GS) method for minimizing nonsmooth nonconvex functions is presented. One drawback in GS method is the need of solving a Quadratic optimization Problem (QP) at each iteration, which is…

We present a stochastic setting for optimization problems with nonsmooth convex separable objective functions over linear equality constraints. To solve such problems, we propose a stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers…

Variational Optimization forms a differentiable upper bound on an objective. We show that approaches such as Natural Evolution Strategies and Gaussian Perturbation, are special cases of Variational Optimization in which the expectations are…

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…