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In this paper, we consider the problem of stochastic optimization, where the objective function is in terms of the expectation of a (possibly non-convex) cost function that is parametrized by a random variable. While the convergence speed…
We study the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation and present efficient and practical algorithms that come with strong optimality guarantees. We begin by proving lower bounds that establish baselines on both the…
In this paper, we develop a new accelerated stochastic gradient method for efficiently solving the convex regularized empirical risk minimization problem in mini-batch settings. The use of mini-batches is becoming a golden standard in the…
We consider policy gradient methods for stochastic optimal control problem in continuous time. In particular, we analyze the gradient flow for the control, viewed as a continuous time limit of the policy gradient method. We prove the global…
Stochastic coordinate descent algorithms are efficient methods in which each iterate is obtained by fixing most coordinates at their values from the current iteration, and approximately minimizing the objective with respect to the remaining…
Variational inequalities are a universal optimization paradigm that is interesting in itself, but also incorporates classical minimization and saddle point problems. Modern realities encourage to consider stochastic formulations of…
Min-max optimization is emerging as a key framework for analyzing problems of robustness to strategically and adversarially generated data. We propose a random reshuffling-based gradient free Optimistic Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithm for…
We develop an algorithmic framework for solving convex optimization problems using no-regret game dynamics. By converting the problem of minimizing a convex function into an auxiliary problem of solving a min-max game in a sequential…
Majorization-minimization schemes are a broad class of iterative methods targeting general optimization problems, including nonconvex, nonsmooth and stochastic. These algorithms minimize successively a sequence of upper bounds of the…
Nonconvex optimization problems arise in many areas of computational science and engineering and are (approximately) solved by a variety of algorithms. Existing algorithms usually only have local convergence or subsequence convergence of…
Asynchronous parallel implementations for stochastic optimization have received huge successes in theory and practice recently. Asynchronous implementations with lock-free are more efficient than the one with writing or reading lock. In…
Variational inequalities are a formalism that includes games, minimization, saddle point, and equilibrium problems as special cases. Methods for variational inequalities are therefore universal approaches for many applied tasks, including…
Stochastic gradient descent is a canonical tool for addressing stochastic optimization problems, and forms the bedrock of modern machine learning and statistics. In this work, we seek to balance the fact that attenuating step-size is…
Stochastic optimization methods have been hugely successful in making large-scale optimization problems feasible when computing the full gradient is computationally prohibitive. Using the theory of modified equations for numerical…
The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…
We consider stochastic control models with Borel spaces and universally measurable policies. For such models the standard policy iteration is known to have difficult measurability issues and cannot be carried out in general. We present a…
We propose a semi-stochastic Frank-Wolfe algorithm with away-steps for regularized empirical risk minimization and extend it to problems with block-coordinate structure. Our algorithms use adaptive step-size and we show that they converge…
Contextual stochastic optimization is an advanced methodology to model uncertainty in the presence of contextual information during decision planning processes. Although classical methodologies focus on minimizing the expectation of a…
We study a fundamental stochastic selection problem involving $n$ independent random variables, each of which can be queried at some cost. Given a tolerance level $\delta$, the goal is to find a value that is $\delta$-approximately minimum…
We propose a unifying framework for the automated computer-assisted worst-case analysis of cyclic block coordinate algorithms in the unconstrained smooth convex optimization setup. We compute exact worst-case bounds for the cyclic…