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Stochastic compositional optimization arises in many important machine learning tasks such as value function evaluation in reinforcement learning and portfolio management. The objective function is the composition of two expectations of…
Recently, convex nested stochastic composite optimization (NSCO) has received considerable attention for its applications in reinforcement learning and risk-averse optimization. The current NSCO algorithms have worse stochastic oracle…
This paper explores the non-convex composition optimization in the form including inner and outer finite-sum functions with a large number of component functions. This problem arises in some important applications such as nonlinear…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-level compositional optimization, where the objective function is a composition of multiple smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Existing methods for solving this problem…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…
In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…
We propose a novel stochastic smoothing accelerated gradient (SSAG) method for general constrained nonsmooth convex composite optimization, and analyze the convergence rates. The SSAG method allows various smoothing techniques, and can deal…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…
In this paper, we consider non-smooth stochastic convex optimization with two function evaluations per round under infinite noise variance. In the classical setting when noise has finite variance, an optimal algorithm, built upon the…
Convex composition optimization is an emerging topic that covers a wide range of applications arising from stochastic optimal control, reinforcement learning and multi-stage stochastic programming. Existing algorithms suffer from…
As application demands for zeroth-order (gradient-free) optimization accelerate, the need for variance reduced and faster converging approaches is also intensifying. This paper addresses these challenges by presenting: a) a comprehensive…
We study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient…
In this paper, we consider the convex and non-convex composition problem with the structure $\frac{1}{n}\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^n {{F_i}( {G( x )} )}$, where $G( x )=\frac{1}{n}\sum\nolimits_{j = 1}^n {{G_j}( x )} $ is the inner function, and…
Stochastic compositional optimization generalizes classic (non-compositional) stochastic optimization to the minimization of compositions of functions. Each composition may introduce an additional expectation. The series of expectations may…
We develop a novel and single-loop variance-reduced algorithm to solve a class of stochastic nonconvex-convex minimax problems involving a nonconvex-linear objective function, which has various applications in different fields such as…
Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem,…
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…
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…