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Related papers: Subdifferentials of Value Functions in Nonconvex D…

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Nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems broadly emerge in machine learning and business decision making, whereas two core challenges impede the development of efficient solution methods with finite-time convergence guarantee: the lack of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-18 Tianyi Lin , Zeyu Zheng , Michael I. Jordan

An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested experimentally for solving stochastic optimization problems in which the decision variables are constrained to satisfy equations defined by deterministic, smooth, and nonlinear functions. It is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-09 Frank E. Curtis , Daniel P. Robinson , Baoyu Zhou

Adam is a popular variant of stochastic gradient descent for finding a local minimizer of a function. In the constant stepsize regime, assuming that the objective function is differentiable and non-convex, we establish the convergence in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-05-15 Anas Barakat , Pascal Bianchi

Our approach is part of the close link between continuous dissipative dynamical systems and optimization algorithms. We aim to solve convex minimization problems by means of stochastic inertial differential equations which are driven by the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-06 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Jalal Fadili , Hedy Attouch , Peter Ochs

We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function given quantum access to a stochastic gradient oracle. We provide two new methods for the special case of minimizing a Lipschitz convex function. Each method obtains a dimension…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-07-26 Aaron Sidford , Chenyi Zhang

Stochastic convex optimization problems with nonlinear functional constraints are ubiquitous in signal processing applications including constrained least-squares, set-membership adaptive filtering, and trajectory optimization under…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-16 Panchajanya Sanyal , Srujan Teja Thomdapu , Ketan Rajawat

Sparse functional/longitudinal data have attracted widespread interest due to the prevalence of such data in social and life sciences. A prominent scenario where such data are routinely encountered are accelerated longitudinal studies,…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-06-24 Yidong Zhou , Hans-Georg Müller

This paper studies the dynamic programming principle using the measurable selection method for stochastic control of continuous processes. The novelty of this work is to incorporate intermediate expectation constraints on the canonical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-22 Yuk-Loong Chow , Xiang Yu , Chao Zhou

We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2012-06-21 William B. Haskell , Rahul Jain

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with adaptive steps is widely used to train deep neural networks and generative models. Most theoretical results assume that it is possible to obtain unbiased gradient estimators, which is not the case in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-17 Sobihan Surendran , Antoine Godichon-Baggioni , Adeline Fermanian , Sylvain Le Corff

Machine learning models are increasingly used in high-stakes decision-making systems. In such applications, a major concern is that these models sometimes discriminate against certain demographic groups such as individuals with certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Andrew Lowy , Devansh Gupta , Meisam Razaviyayn

We consider the optimal control problem of a general nonlinear spatio-temporal system described by Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Theory and algorithms for control of spatio-temporal systems are of rising interest among the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-12 Ethan N. Evans , Oswin So , Andrew P. Kendall , Guan-Horng Liu , Evangelos A. Theodorou

Block-coordinate algorithms are recognized to furnish efficient iterative schemes for addressing large-scale problems, especially when the computation of full derivatives entails substantial memory requirements and computational efforts. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-16 Pedro Pérez-Aros , David Torregrosa-Belén

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-19 Damek Davis , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-12 Stephan Mandt , Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

Dirichlet processes (DP) are widely applied in Bayesian nonparametric modeling. However, in their basic form they do not directly integrate dependency information among data arising from space and time. In this paper, we propose location…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-04 Shiliang Sun , John Paisley , Qiuyang Liu

The space of value functions is a fundamental concept in reinforcement learning. Characterizing its geometric properties may provide insights for optimization and representation. Existing works mainly focus on the value space for Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-12 Kaixin Wang , Navdeep Kumar , Kuangqi Zhou , Bryan Hooi , Jiashi Feng , Shie Mannor

The subdifferential of a function is a generalization for nonsmooth functions of the concept of gradient. It is frequently used in variational analysis, particularly in the context of nonsmooth optimization. The present work proposes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-09-13 Charles Audet , Warren Hare

Devising optimal interventions for constraining stochastic systems is a challenging endeavour that has to confront the interplay between randomness and nonlinearity. Existing methods for identifying the necessary dynamical adjustments…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-10-18 Dimitra Maoutsa , Manfred Opper

We investigate the convergence rate of the recently proposed subgradient-push method for distributed optimization over time-varying directed graphs. The subgradient-push method can be implemented in a distributed way without requiring…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-02-17 Angelia Nedic , Alex Olshevsky