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This paper presents the first sufficient conditions that guarantee the stability and almost sure convergence of multi-timescale stochastic approximation (SA) iterates. It extends the existing results on one-timescale and two-timescale SA…
Stochastic Proximal Gradient (SPG) methods have been widely used for solving optimization problems with a simple (possibly non-smooth) regularizer in machine learning and statistics. However, to the best of our knowledge no non-asymptotic…
We provide performance guarantees for a variant of simulation-based policy iteration for controlling Markov decision processes that involves the use of stochastic approximation algorithms along with state-of-the-art techniques that are…
In this paper, we study and analyze the mini-batch version of StochAstic Recursive grAdient algoritHm (SARAH), a method employing the stochastic recursive gradient, for solving empirical loss minimization for the case of nonconvex losses.…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…
This paper investigates to what extent one can improve reinforcement learning algorithms. Our study is split in three parts. First, our analysis shows that the classical asymptotic convergence rate $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ is pessimistic and can be…
This paper concerns quasi-stochastic approximation (QSA) to solve root finding problems commonly found in applications to optimization and reinforcement learning. The general constant gain algorithm may be expressed as the…
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…
Two-time-scale Stochastic Approximation (SA) is an iterative algorithm with applications in reinforcement learning and optimization. Prior finite time analysis of such algorithms has focused on fixed point iterations with mappings…
We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…
We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…
This paper considers convex optimization problems where nodes of a network have access to summands of a global objective. Each of these local objectives is further assumed to be an average of a finite set of functions. The motivation for…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
We propose dynamic sampled stochastic approximation (SA) methods for stochastic optimization with a heavy-tailed distribution (with finite 2nd moment). The objective is the sum of a smooth convex function with a convex regularizer.…
Many recent applications in machine learning and data fitting call for the algorithmic solution of structured smooth convex optimization problems. Although the gradient descent method is a natural choice for this task, it requires exact…
In the machine learning and optimization community, there are two main approaches for the convex risk minimization problem, namely, the Stochastic Approximation (SA) and the Sample Average Approximation (SAA). In terms of oracle complexity…
We investigate the Randomized Stochastic Accelerated Gradient (RSAG) method, utilizing either constant or adaptive step sizes, for stochastic optimization problems with generalized smooth objective functions. Under relaxed affine variance…
Averaging, or smoothing, is a fundamental approach to obtain stable, de-noised estimates from noisy observations. In certain scenarios, observations made along trajectories of random dynamical systems are of particular interest. One popular…
Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…