Related papers: Minimizing a stochastic convex function subject to…
We analyze the performance of alternating minimization for loss functions optimized over two variables, where each variable may be restricted to lie in some potentially nonconvex constraint set. This type of setting arises naturally in…
Consider a real-valued function that can only be observed with stochastic noise at a finite set of design points within a Euclidean space. We wish to determine whether there exists a convex function that goes through the true function…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…
Let X_t, 0<=t<=T be a one-dimensional stochastic process with independent and stationary increments. This paper considers the problem of stopping the process X_t "as close as possible" to its eventual supremum M_T:=sup{X_t: 0<=t<=T}, when…
We propose a novel study of the stochastic proximal gradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth. Under suitable assumptions and without requiring any boundedness or control of the variance of the…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a classical approach for stochastic convex optimization. Previous studies have demonstrated that the convergence rate of SA can be improved by introducing either smoothness or strong convexity condition. In…
This paper studies a structured compound stochastic program (SP) involving multiple expectations coupled by nonconvex and nonsmooth functions. We present a successive convex-programming based sampling algorithm and establish its…
We obtain non asymptotic concentration bounds for two kinds of stochastic approximations. We first consider the deviations between the expectation of a given function of the Euler scheme of some diffusion process at a fixed deterministic…
Concerning Numerical Stochastic Perturbation Theory, we discuss the convergence of the stochastic process (idea of the proof, features of the limit distribution, rate of convergence to equilibrium). Then we also discuss the expected…
We prove that the smallest minimizer s(f) of a real convex function f is less than or equal to a real point x if and only if the right derivative of f at x is non-negative. Similarly, the largest minimizer t(f) is greater or equal to x if…
Min-max problems have broad applications in machine learning, including learning with non-decomposable loss and learning with robustness to data distribution. Convex-concave min-max problem is an active topic of research with efficient…
We investigate the stochastic optimization problem of minimizing population risk, where the loss defining the risk is assumed to be weakly convex. Compositions of Lipschitz convex functions with smooth maps are the primary examples of such…
When there are infinitely many scenarios, the current studies of two-stage stochastic programming problems rely on the relatively complete recourse assumption. However, such assumption can be unrealistic for many real-world problems. This…
We consider the problem of approximating the solution of variational problems subject to the constraint that the admissible functions must be convex. This problem is at the interface between convex analysis, convex optimization, variational…
We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…
We consider the estimation of quadratic functionals in a Gaussian sequence model where the eigenvalues are supposed to be unknown and accessible through noisy observations only. Imposing smoothness assumptions both on the signal and the…
This paper has two main goals: (a) establish several statistical properties---consistency, asymptotic distributions, and convergence rates---of stationary solutions and values of a class of coupled nonconvex and nonsmoothempirical risk…
Stochastic non-smooth convex optimization constitutes a class of problems in machine learning and operations research. This paper considers minimization of a non-smooth function based on stochastic subgradients. When the function has a…
This paper considers stochastic weakly convex optimization without the standard Lipschitz continuity assumption. Based on new adaptive regularization (stepsize) strategies, we show that a wide class of stochastic algorithms, including the…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…