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The standard theory of stochastic approximation (SA) is extended to the case when the constraint set is a Riemannian manifold. Specifically, the standard ODE method for analyzing SA schemes is extended to iterations constrained to stay on a…
Stochastic approximation is one of the effective approach to deal with the large-scale machine learning problems and the recent research has focused on reduction of variance, caused by the noisy approximations of the gradients. In this…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a powerful class of iterative algorithms for nonlinear root-finding that can be used for minimizing a loss function, $L(\boldsymbol{\theta})$, with respect to a parameter vector $\boldsymbol{\theta}$, when…
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…
In this thesis, we consider the Wasserstein barycenter problem of discrete probability measures from computational and statistical sides. The statistical focus is estimating the sample size of measures necessary to calculate an…
Wasserstein barycenters define averages of probability measures in a geometrically meaningful way. Their use is increasingly popular in applied fields, such as image, geometry or language processing. In these fields however, the probability…
Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a popular approach for solving fixed-point equations where the information is corrupted by noise. In this paper, we consider an SA involving a contraction mapping with respect to an arbitrary norm, and show…
We analyze the tail behavior of solutions to sample average approximations (SAAs) of stochastic programs posed in Hilbert spaces. We require that the integrand be strongly convex with the same convexity parameter for each realization.…
We consider saddle point problems which objective functions are the average of $n$ strongly convex-concave individual components. Recently, researchers exploit variance reduction methods to solve such problems and achieve linear-convergence…
This paper presents a stochastic approximation proximal subgradient (SAPS) method for stochastic convex-concave minimax optimization. By accessing unbiased and variance bounded approximate subgradients, we show that this algorithm exhibits…
Computational implementation of optimal transport barycenters for a set of target probability measures requires a form of approximation, a widespread solution being empirical approximation of measures. We provide an $O(\sqrt{N/n})$…
We study the unconstrained minimization of a smooth and strongly convex population loss function under a stochastic oracle that introduces both additive and multiplicative noise; this is a canonical and widely-studied setting that arises…
Constant-stepsize stochastic approximation (SA) is widely used in learning for computational efficiency. For a fixed stepsize, the iterates typically admit a stationary distribution that is rarely tractable. Prior work shows that as the…
This paper focuses on finding approximate solutions to stochastic optimal control problems with control domains being not necessarily convex, where the state trajectory is subject to controlled stochastic differential equations. The…
Variational problems that involve Wasserstein distances and more generally optimal transport (OT) theory are playing an increasingly important role in data sciences. Such problems can be used to form an examplar measure out of various…
We propose a new stochastic first-order algorithmic framework to solve stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problems that covers both finite-sum and expectation settings. Our algorithms rely on the SARAH estimator introduced in…
Motivated by problems arising in decentralized control problems and non-cooperative Nash games, we consider a class of strongly monotone Cartesian variational inequality (VI) problems, where the mappings either contain expectations or their…
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 study a statistical method to estimate the optimal value, and the optimality gap of a given solution for stochastic optimization as an assessment of the solution quality. Our approach is based on bootstrap aggregating, or bagging,…
Two-stage stochastic optimization is a framework for modeling uncertainty, where we have a probability distribution over possible realizations of the data, called scenarios, and decisions are taken in two stages: we make first-stage…