Related papers: Multi-Level Composite Stochastic Optimization via …
In this work, we consider the problem of a network of agents collectively minimizing a sum of convex functions. The agents in our setting can only access their local objective functions and exchange information with their immediate…
In this paper, we revisit and improve the convergence of policy gradient (PG), natural PG (NPG) methods, and their variance-reduced variants, under general smooth policy parametrizations. More specifically, with the Fisher information…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of stochastic multi-level compositional optimization, where the objective function is a composition of multiple smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Existing methods for solving this problem…
Stochastic particle-optimization sampling (SPOS) is a recently-developed scalable Bayesian sampling framework that unifies stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) algorithms based on Wasserstein…
This work considers optimization of composition of functions in a nested form over Riemannian manifolds where each function contains an expectation. This type of problems is gaining popularity in applications such as policy evaluation in…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…
Consider the stochastic composition optimization problem where the objective is a composition of two expected-value functions. We propose a new stochastic first-order method, namely the accelerated stochastic compositional proximal gradient…
Many applications in machine learning or signal processing involve nonsmooth optimization problems. This nonsmoothness brings a low-dimensional structure to the optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a randomized proximal gradient…
Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…
We propose a stochastic conditional gradient method (CGM) for minimizing convex finite-sum objectives formed as a sum of smooth and non-smooth terms. Existing CGM variants for this template either suffer from slow convergence rates, or…
We investigate the problem of computing a nested expectation of the form $\mathbb{P}[\mathbb{E}[X|Y] \!\geq\!0]\!=\!\mathbb{E}[\textrm{H}(\mathbb{E}[X|Y])]$ where $\textrm{H}$ is the Heaviside function. This nested expectation appears, for…
This paper focuses on minimizing a smooth function combined with a nonsmooth regularization term on a compact Riemannian submanifold embedded in the Euclidean space under a decentralized setting. Typically, there are two types of approaches…
We propose the stochastic average gradient (SAG) method for optimizing the sum of a finite number of smooth convex functions. Like stochastic gradient (SG) methods, the SAG method's iteration cost is independent of the number of terms in…
High-probability guarantees in stochastic optimization are often obtained only under strong noise assumptions such as sub-Gaussian tails. We show that such guarantees can also be achieved under the weaker assumption of bounded variance by…
We propose a randomized nonmonotone block proximal gradient (RNBPG) method for minimizing the sum of a smooth (possibly nonconvex) function and a block-separable (possibly nonconvex nonsmooth) function. At each iteration, this method…
In this paper, we address \ac{SGNEP} seeking with risk-neutral agents. Our main contribution lies the development of a stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) technique, modified to contend with general sample spaces, within a…
Stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints have a broad range of applications in intelligent transportation, cyber-security, and smart grids. In this paper, first, we propose an inexact-proximal accelerated…
We consider the unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is composed of a smooth and a non-smooth conponents where the smooth component is the expectation a random function. This type of problem arises in some interesting…
In this note we propose a new variant of the hybrid variance-reduced proximal gradient method in [7] to solve a common stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problem under standard assumptions. We simply replace the independent…