Related papers: Stochastic approximation with cone-contractive ope…
Exponential generalization bounds with near-tight rates have recently been established for uniformly stable learning algorithms. The notion of uniform stability, however, is stringent in the sense that it is invariant to the data-generating…
Optimizing large-scale wireless networks, including optimal resource management, power allocation, and throughput maximization, is inherently challenging due to their non-observable system dynamics and heterogeneous and complex nature.…
We study the problem of learning mixtures of linear classifiers under Gaussian covariates. Given sample access to a mixture of $r$ distributions on $\mathbb{R}^n$ of the form $(\mathbf{x},y_{\ell})$, $\ell\in [r]$, where…
Subgradient algorithms for training support vector machines have been quite successful for solving large-scale and online learning problems. However, they have been restricted to linear kernels and strongly convex formulations. This paper…
Q-learning is widely used algorithm in reinforcement learning community. Under the lookup table setting, its convergence is well established. However, its behavior is known to be unstable with the linear function approximation case. This…
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…
We present several polynomial- and quasipolynomial-time approximation schemes for a large class of generalized operator norms. Special cases include the $2\rightarrow q$ norm of matrices for $q>2$, the support function of the set of…
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in analyzing the non-asymptotic behavior of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the performance of such algorithms in non-ideal environments, such as in the presence of…
Minimizing empirical risk subject to a set of constraints can be a useful strategy for learning restricted classes of functions, such as monotonic functions, submodular functions, classifiers that guarantee a certain class label for some…
In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…
We study the following question in the context of imitation learning for continuous control: how are the underlying stability properties of an expert policy reflected in the sample-complexity of an imitation learning task? We provide the…
A fundamental problem in adversarial machine learning is to quantify how much training data is needed in the presence of evasion attacks. In this paper we address this issue within the framework of PAC learning, focusing on the class of…
The proximal gradient algorithm for minimizing the sum of a smooth and a nonsmooth convex function often converges linearly even without strong convexity. One common reason is that a multiple of the step length at each iteration may…
Adversarial training is by far the most successful strategy for improving robustness of neural networks to adversarial attacks. Despite its success as a defense mechanism, adversarial training fails to generalize well to unperturbed test…
The objective in this paper is to obtain fast converging reinforcement learning algorithms to approximate solutions to the problem of discounted cost optimal stopping in an irreducible, uniformly ergodic Markov chain, evolving on a compact…
In an episodic Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem, an online algorithm chooses from a set of actions in a sequence of $H$ trials, where $H$ is the episode length, in order to maximize the total payoff of the chosen actions. Q-learning,…
We explore the potential for using a nonsmooth loss function based on the max-norm in the training of an artificial neural network. We hypothesise that this may lead to superior classification results in some special cases where the…
We introduce a new method for solving nonlinear continuous optimization problems with chance constraints. Our method is based on a reformulation of the probabilistic constraint as a quantile function. The quantile function is approximated…
This paper studies the performative prediction problem which optimizes a stochastic loss function with data distribution that depends on the decision variable. We consider a setting where the agent(s) provides samples adapted to the…
This work develops new results for stochastic approximation algorithms. The emphases are on treating algorithms and limits with discontinuities. The main ingredients include the use of differential inclusions, set-valued analysis, and…