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Bayesian optimization is a sample-efficient method for solving expensive, black-box optimization problems. Stochastic programming concerns optimization under uncertainty where, typically, average performance is the quantity of interest. In…
Simulated annealing (SA) is a stochastic global optimisation technique applicable to a wide range of discrete and continuous variable problems. Despite its simplicity, the development of an effective SA optimiser for a given problem hinges…
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 consider the problems of estimation and optimization of two popular convex risk measures: utility-based shortfall risk (UBSR) and Optimized Certainty Equivalent (OCE) risk. We extend these risk measures to cover possibly unbounded random…
This paper presents an efficient algorithm for the progressive approximation of Wasserstein barycenters of persistence diagrams, with applications to the visual analysis of ensemble data. Given a set of scalar fields, our approach enables…
We consider a single stage stochastic program without recourse with a strictly convex loss function. We assume a compact decision space and grid it with a finite set of points. In addition, we assume that the decision maker can generate…
We consider stochastic strongly-convex-strongly-concave (SCSC) saddle point (SP) problems which frequently arise in applications ranging from distributionally robust learning to game theory and fairness in machine learning. We focus on the…
We consider the stochastic optimization problem where a convex function is minimized observing recursively the gradients. We introduce SAEW, a new procedure that accelerates exponential weights procedures with the slow rate $1/\sqrt{T}$ to…
Over the past ten years, driven by large scale optimisation problems arising from machine learning, the development of stochastic optimisation methods have witnessed a tremendous growth. However, despite their popularity, the theoretical…
Based on the stochastic maximum principle for the partially coupled forward-backward stochastic control system (FBSCS for short), a modified method of successive approximations (MSA for short) is established for stochastic recursive optimal…
We introduce a new approach to develop stochastic optimization algorithms for a class of stochastic composite and possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The main idea is to combine two stochastic estimators to create a new hybrid one. We…
We study the complexity of approximating Wassertein barycenter of $m$ discrete measures, or histograms of size $n$ by contrasting two alternative approaches, both using entropic regularization. The first approach is based on the Iterative…
The Wasserstein barycenter (WB) is an important tool for summarizing sets of probability measures. It finds applications in applied probability, clustering, image processing, etc. When the measures' supports are finite, computing a…
Inspired by recent advances in distributed algorithms for approximating Wasserstein barycenters, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for this problem. The main novelty is that we consider time-varying computational networks, which are…
This paper proposes a constrained stochastic successive convex approximation (CSSCA) algorithm to find a stationary point for a general non-convex stochastic optimization problem, whose objective and constraint functions are non-convex and…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a powerful and scalable computational method for iteratively estimating the solution of optimization problems in the presence of randomness, particularly well-suited for large-scale and streaming data…
This article describes a novel approach to chance-constrained programming based on the sample average approximation (SAA) method. Recent work focuses on heuristic approximations to the SAA problem and we introduce a novel approach which…
Combinatorial optimization problems can be solved by heuristic algorithms such as simulated annealing (SA) which aims to find the optimal solution within a large search space through thermal fluctuations. The algorithm generates new…
We present and study a novel algorithm for the computation of 2-Wasserstein population barycenters of absolutely continuous probability measures on Euclidean space. The proposed method can be seen as a stochastic gradient descent procedure…
The stochastic simulation algorithm (SSA) and the corresponding Monte Carlo (MC) method are among the most common approaches for studying stochastic processes. They rely on knowledge of interevent probability density functions (PDFs) and on…