Related papers: Stochastic Approximation versus Sample Average App…
Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a cost function parameterized by a random variable. The classical sample average approximation (SAA) method for solving this problem requires minimization of an ensemble average of…
Optimal transport is a notoriously difficult problem to solve numerically, with current approaches often remaining intractable for very large scale applications such as those encountered in machine learning. Wasserstein barycenters -- the…
In this paper, a stochastic approximation (SA) based distributed algorithm is proposed to solve the resource allocation (RA) with uncertainties. In this problem, a group of agents cooperatively optimize a separable optimization problem with…
We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained.…
We consider stochastic optimization problems with non-convex functional constraints, such as those arising in trajectory generation, sparse approximation, and robust classification. To this end, we put forth a recursive momentum-based…
Many real-world decision-making problems have uncertain parameters in constraints. Wasserstein distributionally robust joint chance constraints (WDRJCC) offer a promising solution by explicitly guaranteeing the probability of the…
The planted coloring problem is a prototypical inference problem for which thresholds for Bayes optimal algorithms, like Belief Propagation (BP), can be computed analytically. In this paper, we analyze the limits and performances of the…
This paper investigates the robust optimal control of sampled-data stochastic systems with multiplicative noise and distributional ambiguity. We consider a class of discrete-time optimal control problems where the controller \emph{jointly}…
In data-driven optimization, sample average approximation (SAA) is known to suffer from the so-called optimizer's curse that causes an over-optimistic evaluation of the solution performance. We argue that a special type of distributionallly…
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…
We study uncertainty quantification for contextual stochastic optimization, focusing on weighted sample average approximation (wSAA), which uses machine-learned relevance weights based on covariates. Although wSAA is widely used for…
Wasserstein barycenters provide a principled approach for aggregating probability measures, while preserving the geometry of their ambient space. Existing discrete methods are not scalable as they assume access to the complete set of…
Efficiently aggregating data from different sources is a challenging problem, particularly when samples from each source are distributed differently. These differences can be inherent to the inference task or present for other reasons:…
The stochastic Auxiliary Problem Principle (APP) algorithm is a general Stochastic Approximation (SA) scheme that turns the resolution of an original optimization problem into the iterative resolution of a sequence of auxiliary problems.…
Block coordinate descent methods and stochastic subgradient methods have been extensively studied in optimization and machine learning. By combining randomized block sampling with stochastic subgradient methods based on dual averaging, we…
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…
The sample average approximation (SAA) and the stochastic approximation (SA) are two popular schemes for solving the stochastic variational inequalities problem (SVIP). In the past decades, theories on the consistency of the SAA solutions…
We consider a composite convex minimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization, which often arises in machine learning. We propose two new stochastic gradient methods that are based on stochastic dual averaging…
We consider applying stochastic approximation (SA) methods to solve nonsmooth variational inclusion problems. Existing studies have shown that the averaged iterates of SA methods exhibit asymptotic normality, with an optimal limiting…
Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…