Related papers: Stochastic Successive Convex Approximation for Gen…
The classical Method of Successive Approximations (MSA) is an iterative method for solving stochastic control problems and is derived from Pontryagin's optimality principle. It is known that the MSA may fail to converge. Using careful…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
We consider a two-stage stochastic optimization problem, in which a long-term optimization variable is coupled with a set of short-term optimization variables in both objective and constraint functions. Despite that two-stage stochastic…
In this paper, we consider constrained optimization problems with convex, smooth objective and constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called the Stochastic Moving Ball Approximation (SMBA) method, to solve this class…
Simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) is widely used in stochastic optimization due to its high efficiency, asymptotic stability, and reduced number of required loss function measurements. However, the standard SPSA…
This paper presents a Successive Convexification ($ \texttt{SCvx} $) algorithm to solve a class of non-convex optimal control problems with certain types of state constraints. Sources of non-convexity may include nonlinear dynamics and…
Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems with affine constraints and develop several methods using either primal or dual approach to solve it. In the primal case, we use a special penalization technique to make the initial…
A framework is introduced for sequentially solving convex stochastic minimization problems, where the objective functions change slowly, in the sense that the distance between successive minimizers is bounded. The minimization problems are…
Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in parallel and distributed optimization methods for large-scale systems. In particular, nonconvex large-scale optimization problems have found a wide range of applications in several…
In this paper, we consider non-convex stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) problems that have many applications in machine learning. Although numerous studies have proposed stochastic algorithms for solving these problems, they are limited…
The Method of Successive Approximations (MSA) is a fixed-point iterative method used to solve stochastic optimal control problems. It is an indirect method based on the conditions derived from the Stochastic Maximum Principle (SMP), an…
A sequential quadratic programming method is designed for solving general smooth nonlinear stochastic optimization problems subject to expectation equality constraints. We consider the setting where the objective and constraint function…
This paper considers the problem of minimizing a convex expectation function with a set of inequality convex expectation constraints. We present a computable stochastic approximation type algorithm, namely the stochastic linearized proximal…
We consider convex-concave saddle-point problems where the objective functions may be split in many components, and extend recent stochastic variance reduction methods (such as SVRG or SAGA) to provide the first large-scale linearly…
Stochastic Approximation has been a prominent set of tools for solving problems with noise and uncertainty. Increasingly, it becomes important to solve optimization problems wherein there is noise in both a set of constraints that a…
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…
Stochastic convex optimization, where the objective is the expectation of a random convex function, is an important and widely used method with numerous applications in machine learning, statistics, operations research and other areas. We…
This paper considers smooth convex optimization problems with many functional constraints. To solve this general class of problems we propose a new stochastic perturbed augmented Lagrangian method, called SGDPA, where a perturbation is…
We study distributed stochastic nonconvex optimization in multi-agent networks. We introduce a novel algorithmic framework for the distributed minimization of the sum of the expected value of a smooth (possibly nonconvex) function (the…