Related papers: Optimal Matrix Momentum Stochastic Approximation a…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…
Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ oracle complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary…
We develop Second Order Asymptotical Regularization (SOAR) methods for solving inverse source problems in elliptic partial differential equations with both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary data. We show the convergence results of SOAR with…
Algorithms for solving \textit{nonlinear} fixed-point equations -- such as average-reward \textit{$Q$-learning} and \textit{TD-learning} -- often involve semi-norm contractions. Achieving parameter-free optimal convergence rates for these…
We improve the theoretical and empirical performance of neural-network(NN)-based active learning algorithms for the non-parametric streaming setting. In particular, we introduce two regret metrics by minimizing the population loss that are…
We study composite optimization problems in which the smooth part of the objective function is \( p \)-times continuously differentiable, where \( p \geq 1 \) is an integer. Higher-order methods are known to be effective for solving such…
In [19], a general, inexact, efficient proximal quasi-Newton algorithm for composite optimization problems has been proposed and a sublinear global convergence rate has been established. In this paper, we analyze the convergence properties…
In this work, we investigate stochastic approximation (SA) with Markovian data and nonlinear updates under constant stepsize $\alpha>0$. Existing work has primarily focused on either i.i.d. data or linear update rules. We take a new…
In this work we investigate stochastic non-convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth loss functions, and the goal is to find an approximate stationary point. The most popular approach to handling such…
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…
In this paper we study several classes of stochastic optimization algorithms enriched with heavy ball momentum. Among the methods studied are: stochastic gradient descent, stochastic Newton, stochastic proximal point and stochastic dual…
Discrete stochastic optimization considers the problem of minimizing (or maximizing) loss functions defined on discrete sets, where only noisy measurements of the loss functions are available. The discrete stochastic optimization problem is…
We develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…
Q-learning is a stochastic approximation version of the classic value iteration. The literature has established that Q-learning suffers from both maximization bias and slower convergence. Recently, multi-step algorithms have shown practical…
Stochastic composition optimization draws much attention recently and has been successful in many emerging applications of machine learning, statistical analysis, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we focus on the composition…
We study the so-called two-time-scale stochastic approximation, a simulation-based approach for finding the roots of two coupled nonlinear operators. Our focus is to characterize its finite-time performance in a Markov setting, which often…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is one of the most widely used optimization algorithms in machine learning. While optimization properties of SGDM have been extensively studied in the literature, it remains insufficiently…
The ODE method has been a workhorse for algorithm design and analysis since the introduction of the stochastic approximation. It is now understood that convergence theory amounts to establishing robustness of Euler approximations for ODEs,…
Theory and application of stochastic approximation (SA) have become increasingly relevant due in part to applications in optimization and reinforcement learning. This paper takes a new look at SA with constant step-size $\alpha>0$, defined…
We consider the problem of finding the optimal value of n in the n-step temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm. Our objective function for the optimization problem is the average root mean squared error (RMSE). We find the optimal n by…