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Stochastic approximation is a foundation for many algorithms found in machine learning and optimization. It is in general slow to converge: the mean square error vanishes as $O(n^{-1})$. A deterministic counterpart known as quasi-stochastic…
Machine learning problems such as neural network training, tensor decomposition, and matrix factorization, require local minimization of a nonconvex function. This local minimization is challenged by the presence of saddle points, of which…
The low-rank matrix reconstruction (LRMR) approach is widely used in direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. As the rank norm penalty in an LRMR is NP-hard to compute, the nuclear norm (or the trace norm for a positive semidefinite (PSD)…
Principal Component Analysis is a novel way of of dimensionality reduction. This problem essentially boils down to finding the top k eigen vectors of the data covariance matrix. A considerable amount of literature is found on algorithms…
The classical Method of Successive Approximations (MSA) is an iterative method for solving stochastic control problems and is derived from Pontryagin's optimality principle. It is known that the MSA may fail to converge. Using careful…
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…
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 consider in this paper a class of single-ratio fractional minimization problems, in which the numerator part of the objective is the sum of a nonsmooth nonconvex function and a smooth nonconvex function while the denominator part is a…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a method for finding the root of an operator perturbed by noise. There is a rich literature establishing the asymptotic normality of rescaled SA iterates under fairly mild conditions. However, these…
Stochastic variance reduction has proven effective at accelerating first-order algorithms for solving convex finite-sum optimization tasks such as empirical risk minimization. Incorporating second-order information has proven helpful in…
Arguably, the two most popular accelerated or momentum-based optimization methods in machine learning are Nesterov's accelerated gradient and Polyaks's heavy ball, both corresponding to different discretizations of a particular second order…
This work, for the first time, introduces two constant factor approximation algorithms with linear query complexity for non-monotone submodular maximization over a ground set of size $n$ subject to a knapsack constraint, $\mathsf{DLA}$ and…
Motivated by applications in optimization and machine learning, we consider stochastic quasi-Newton (SQN) methods for solving stochastic optimization problems. In the literature, the convergence analysis of these algorithms relies on strong…
During recent years the interest of optimization and machine learning communities in high-probability convergence of stochastic optimization methods has been growing. One of the main reasons for this is that high-probability complexity…
We introduce a streaming framework for analyzing stochastic approximation/optimization problems. This streaming framework is analogous to solving optimization problems using time-varying mini-batches that arrive sequentially. We provide…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a widely used algorithmic approach in various fields, including optimization and reinforcement learning (RL). Among RL algorithms, Q-learning is particularly popular due to its empirical success. In this…
We consider an extension of the Newton-MR algorithm for nonconvex unconstrained optimization to the settings where Hessian information is approximated. Under a particular noise model on the Hessian matrix, we investigate the iteration and…
The problem of minimizing sum-of-nonconvex functions (i.e., convex functions that are average of non-convex ones) is becoming increasingly important in machine learning, and is the core machinery for PCA, SVD, regularized Newton's method,…
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…