Related papers: Finite-Sample Analysis of Stochastic Approximation…
This paper studies a structured compound stochastic program (SP) involving multiple expectations coupled by nonconvex and nonsmooth functions. We present a successive convex-programming based sampling algorithm and establish its…
We study the problem of solving fixed-point equations for seminorm-contractive operators and establish foundational results on the non-asymptotic behavior of iterative algorithms in both deterministic and stochastic settings. Specifically,…
A numerical analysis for the fully discrete approximation of an operator Lyapunov equation related to linear SPDEs (stochastic partial differential equations) driven by multiplicative noise is considered. The discretization of the Lyapunov…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning (RL) with unbounded state space motivated by the classical problem of scheduling in a queueing network. Traditional policies as well as error metric that are designed for finite, bounded or…
In the machine learning and optimization community, there are two main approaches for the convex risk minimization problem, namely, the Stochastic Approximation (SA) and the Sample Average Approximation (SAA). In terms of oracle complexity…
We consider a family of algorithms that successively sample and minimize simple stochastic models of the objective function. We show that under reasonable conditions on approximation quality and regularity of the models, any such algorithm…
Stochastic gradient methods with momentum are widely used in applications and at the core of optimization subroutines in many popular machine learning libraries. However, their sample complexities have not been obtained for problems beyond…
In this paper, we investigate unconstrained and constrained sample-based federated optimization, respectively. For each problem, we propose a privacy preserving algorithm using stochastic successive convex approximation (SSCA) techniques,…
We study unconstrained optimization problems with nonsmooth and convex objective function in the form of a mathematical expectation. The proposed method approximates the expected objective function with a sample average function using…
We consider stochastic optimization problems which use observed data to estimate essential characteristics of the random quantities involved. Sample average approximation (SAA) or empirical (plug-in) estimation are very popular ways to use…
We consider $d$-dimensional linear stochastic approximation algorithms (LSAs) with a constant step-size and the so called Polyak-Ruppert (PR) averaging of iterates. LSAs are widely applied in machine learning and reinforcement learning…
Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms have been widely applied in minimization problems when the loss functions and/or the gradient information are only accessible through noisy evaluations. Stochastic gradient (SG) descent---a…
Sparse learning is a very important tool for mining useful information and patterns from high dimensional data. Non-convex non-smooth regularized learning problems play essential roles in sparse learning, and have drawn extensive attentions…
This paper concerns quasi-stochastic approximation (QSA) to solve root finding problems commonly found in applications to optimization and reinforcement learning. The general constant gain algorithm may be expressed as the…
We study the almost sure convergence of the Stochastic Approximation algorithm to the fixed point $x^\star$ of a nonlinear operator under a negative drift condition and a general noise sequence with finite $p$-th moment for some $p > 1$.…
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…
For complex nonlinear systems, it is challenging to design algorithms that are fast, scalable, and give an accurate approximation of the stability region. This paper proposes a sampling-based approach to address these challenges. By…
In this paper, we introduce the first principled adaptive-sampling procedure for learning a convex function in the $L_\infty$ norm, a problem that arises often in the behavioral and social sciences. We present a function-specific measure of…
Sample average approximation (SAA) is a technique for obtaining approximate solutions to stochastic programs that uses the average from a random sample to approximate the expected value that is being optimized. Since the outcome from…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…