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Clustering is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. Lloyd's algorithm, proposed in 1957, is still possibly the most widely used clustering algorithm in practice due to its simplicity and empirical performance. However,…
Randomized SVD has become an extremely successful approach for efficiently computing a low-rank approximation of matrices. In particular the paper by Halko, Martinsson, and Tropp (SIREV 2011) contains extensive analysis, and has made it a…
Two of the most prominent algorithms for solving unconstrained smooth games are the classical stochastic gradient descent-ascent (SGDA) and the recently introduced stochastic consensus optimization (SCO) [Mescheder et al., 2017]. SGDA is…
We prove that the Random-Edge simplex algorithm requires an expected number of at most 13n/sqrt(d) pivot steps on any simple d-polytope with n vertices. This is the first nontrivial upper bound for general polytopes. We also describe a…
This paper proposes to develop a new variant of the two-time-scale stochastic approximation to find the roots of two coupled nonlinear operators, assuming only noisy samples of these operators can be observed. Our key idea is to leverage…
We consider the stochastic combinatorial semi-bandit problem with adversarial corruptions. We provide a simple combinatorial algorithm that can achieve a regret of $\tilde{O}\left(C+d^2K/\Delta_{min}\right)$ where $C$ is the total amount of…
Two widely used randomized algorithms are the sketch-and-solve method for least-squares regression and the randomized SVD for low-rank approximation. These algorithms apply a random embedding to compress a target matrix, and they perform…
Given a list of N numbers, the maximum can be computed in N iterations. During these N iterations, the maximum gets updated on average as many times as the Nth harmonic number. We first use this fact to approximate the Nth harmonic number…
The $k$-means algorithm (Lloyd's algorithm) is a widely used method for clustering unlabeled data. A key bottleneck of the $k$-means algorithm is that each iteration requires time linear in the number of data points, which can be expensive…
The existence of a polynomial pivot rule for the simplex method for linear programming, policy iteration for Markov decision processes, and strategy improvement for parity games each are prominent open problems in their respective fields.…
Least squares approximation is a technique to find an approximate solution to a system of linear equations that has no exact solution. In a typical setting, one lets $n$ be the number of constraints and $d$ be the number of variables, with…
We consider the contextual bandit problem, where a player sequentially makes decisions based on past observations to maximize the cumulative reward. Although many algorithms have been proposed for contextual bandit, most of them rely on…
We provide a simple new randomized contraction approach to the global minimum cut problem for simple undirected graphs. The contractions exploit 2-out edge sampling from each vertex rather than the standard uniform edge sampling. We…
In two earlier papers, we designed a distributed deterministic asynchronous algorithm for minimizing the sum of subdifferentiable and proximable functions and a regularizing quadratic on time-varying graphs based on Dykstra's algorithm, or…
We consider a distributed stochastic approximation (SA) scheme for computing an equilibrium of a stochastic Nash game. Standard SA schemes employ diminishing steplength sequences that are square summable but not summable. Such requirements…
We study the smoothed online quadratic optimization (SOQO) problem where, at each round $t$, a player plays an action $x_t$ in response to a quadratic hitting cost and an additional squared $\ell_2$-norm cost for switching actions. This…
In this paper we further investigate the well-studied problem of finding a perfect matching in a regular bipartite graph. The first non-trivial algorithm, with running time $O(mn)$, dates back to K\"{o}nig's work in 1916 (here $m=nd$ is the…
Games on graphs provide a natural model for reactive non-terminating systems. In such games, the interaction of two players on an arena results in an infinite path that describes a run of the system. Different settings are used to model…
In this paper, we present novel randomized algorithms for solving saddle point problems whose dual feasible region is given by the direct product of many convex sets. Our algorithms can achieve an ${\cal O}(1/N)$ and ${\cal O}(1/N^2)$ rate…
We study two-player zero-sum stochastic games, and propose a form of independent learning dynamics called Doubly Smoothed Best-Response dynamics, which integrates a discrete and doubly smoothed variant of the best-response dynamics into…