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We study the online estimation of the optimal policy of a Markov decision process (MDP). We propose a class of Stochastic Primal-Dual (SPD) methods which exploit the inherent minimax duality of Bellman equations. The SPD methods update a…
In this work, we develop analysis and algorithms for a class of (stochastic) bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level (LL) problem is strongly convex and linearly constrained. Most existing approaches for solving such problems rely…
We consider stochastic convex optimization with a strongly convex (but not necessarily smooth) objective. We give an algorithm which performs only gradient updates with optimal rate of convergence.
We propose a single time-scale stochastic subgradient method for constrained optimization of a composition of several nonsmooth and nonconvex functions. The functions are assumed to be locally Lipschitz and differentiable in a generalized…
This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…
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.…
We develop a distributed algorithm for convex Empirical Risk Minimization, the problem of minimizing large but finite sum of convex functions over networks. The proposed algorithm is derived from directly discretizing the second-order…
In this paper, we investigate a class of constrained saddle point (SP) problems where the objective function is nonconvex-concave and smooth. This class of problems has wide applicability in machine learning, including robust multi-class…
An algorithm for unconstrained non-convex optimization is described, which does not evaluate the objective function and in which minimization is carried out, at each iteration, within a randomly selected subspace. It is shown that this…
This work puts forward a novel numerical approach for solving the stochastic optimal control problem (SOCP) and the mean field control (MFC) problem using projection algorithm inspired by the stochastic maximum principle (SMP) which is also…
In this paper we propose three $p$-th order tensor methods for $\mu$-strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle point problems (SPP). The first method is based on the assumption of $p$-th order smoothness of the objective and it achieves a…
In many optimization problems arising from scientific, engineering and artificial intelligence applications, objective and constraint functions are available only as the output of a black-box or simulation oracle that does not provide…
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…
Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…
Given a nonsmooth, nonconvex minimization problem, we consider algorithms that iteratively sample and minimize stochastic convex models of the objective function. Assuming that the one-sided approximation quality and the variation of the…
The growing prevalence of nonsmooth optimization problems in machine learning has spurred significant interest in generalized smoothness assumptions. Among these, the (L0, L1)-smoothness assumption has emerged as one of the most prominent.…
We consider the fundamental problem in non-convex optimization of efficiently reaching a stationary point. In contrast to the convex case, in the long history of this basic problem, the only known theoretical results on first-order…
Inverse problems are key issues in several scientific areas, including signal processing and medical imaging. Data-driven approaches for inverse problems aim for learning model and regularization parameters from observed data samples, and…
In this paper, we consider mixed-integer nonsmooth constrained optimization problems whose objective/constraint functions are available only as the output of a black-box zeroth-order oracle (i.e., an oracle that does not provide derivative…
In this paper, we introduce a class of nonsmooth nonconvex least square optimization problem using convex analysis tools and we propose to use the iterative minimization-majorization (MM) algorithm on a convex set with initializer away from…