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This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-27 Michael R. Metel , Akiko Takeda

Many machine learning and optimization algorithms are built upon the framework of stochastic approximation (SA), for which the selection of step-size (or learning rate) $\{\alpha_n\}$ is crucial for success. An essential condition for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-08-05 Caio Kalil Lauand , Sean Meyn

We study the finite-time convergence of TD learning with linear function approximation under Markovian sampling. Existing proofs for this setting either assume a projection step in the algorithm to simplify the analysis, or require a fairly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Aritra Mitra

The paper introduces the first formulation of convex Q-learning for Markov decision processes with function approximation. The algorithms and theory rest on a relaxation of a dual of Manne's celebrated linear programming characterization of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-12 Fan Lu , Sean Meyn

This study presents a method for constructing a sequence of approximate solutions of increasing accuracy to general equilibrium models on nonlocal domains. The method is based on a technique originated from dynamical systems theory. The…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2015-06-16 Viktors Ajevskis

We establish central limit theorems for the Sample Average Approximation (SAA) method in discrete-time, finite-horizon stochastic optimal control. Our analysis is based on an abstract limit theorem for stochastic backward recursions, which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-21 Johannes Milz , Alexander Shapiro

In this paper, we introduce a new class of nonsmooth convex functions called SOS-convex semialgebraic functions extending the recently proposed notion of SOS-convex polynomials. This class of nonsmooth convex functions covers many common…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-02-09 N. H. Chieu , J. W. Feng , W. Gao , G. Li , D. Wu

We consider convex-concave saddle-point problems where the objective functions may be split in many components, and extend recent stochastic variance reduction methods (such as SVRG or SAGA) to provide the first large-scale linearly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-04 P Balamurugan , Francis Bach

This paper considers stochastic optimization problems with weakly convex objective and constraint functions. We propose Prox-PEP, a proximal method equipped with quadratic subproblems. To handle nonlinear equality constraints, we employ an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Lixin Tang , Xingyu Wang , Liwei Zhang

While the rapid progress of deep learning fuels end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL), direct application, especially in high-dimensional space like robotic scenarios still suffers from low sample efficiency. Therefore State Representation…

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-04 Basil M. Idrees , Lavish Arora , Ketan Rajawat

We propose a successive convex approximation based off-policy optimization (SCAOPO) algorithm to solve the general constrained reinforcement learning problem, which is formulated as a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Chang Tian , An Liu , Guang Huang , Wu Luo

We consider convex optimization problems with a possibly nonsmooth objective function in the form of a mathematical expectation. The proposed framework (AN-SPS) employs Sample Average Approximations (SAA) to approximate the objective…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-31 Nataša Krklec Jerinkić , Tijana Ostojić

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-01 Nhan H. Pham , Lam M. Nguyen , Dzung T. Phan , Quoc Tran-Dinh

In this paper, we analyze the finite sample complexity of stochastic system identification using modern tools from machine learning and statistics. An unknown discrete-time linear system evolves over time under Gaussian noise without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Anastasios Tsiamis , George J. Pappas

This paper provides a non-asymptotic analysis of linear stochastic approximation (LSA) algorithms with fixed stepsize. This family of methods arises in many machine learning tasks and is used to obtain approximate solutions of a linear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-03 Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov , Kevin Scaman , Hoi-To Wai

We revisit the convergence analysis of constant stepsize stochastic approximation (SA) with decision-dependent Markovian noise, with a focus on characterizing the stationary bias against the root of the mean-field equation. We first…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-16 Hadi Hadavi , Wenlong Mou , Sergey Samsonov , Hoi-To Wai

Stochastic rounding (SR) is a probabilistic method used to round numbers to floating-point and fixed-point representations. In length $n$ summation, the worst-case error of SR grows as $\sqrt{n}$ with high probability, unlike for standard…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-09 El-Mehdi El Arar , Massimiliano Fasi , Silviu-Ioan Filip , Mantas Mikaitis

SAGA is a fast incremental gradient method on the finite sum problem and its effectiveness has been tested on a vast of applications. In this paper, we analyze SAGA on a class of non-strongly convex and non-convex statistical problem such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-28 Chao Qu , Yan Li , Huan Xu

We study robust convex quadratic programs where the uncertain problem parameters can contain both continuous and integer components. Under the natural boundedness assumption on the uncertainty set, we show that the generic problems are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-12-19 Areesh Mittal , Can Gokalp , Grani A. Hanasusanto