Related papers: Information-Theoretic Lower Bounds for Zero-Order …
We deal with the problem of gradient estimation for stochastic differentiable relaxations of algorithms, operators, simulators, and other non-differentiable functions. Stochastic smoothing conventionally perturbs the input of a…
In this paper, we study the minimax optimization problem in the smooth and strongly convex-strongly concave setting when we have access to noisy estimates of gradients. In particular, we first analyze the stochastic Gradient Descent Ascent…
Finite-difference methods are a class of algorithms designed to solve black-box optimization problems by approximating a gradient of the target function on a set of directions. In black-box optimization, the non-smooth setting is…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…
In this note we propose a new variant of the hybrid variance-reduced proximal gradient method in [7] to solve a common stochastic composite nonconvex optimization problem under standard assumptions. We simply replace the independent…
Gradient matching with Gaussian processes is a promising tool for learning parameters of ordinary differential equations (ODE's). The essence of gradient matching is to model the prior over state variables as a Gaussian process which…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…
In an indirect Gaussian sequence space model lower and upper bounds are derived for the concentration rate of the posterior distribution of the parameter of interest shrinking to the parameter value $\theta^\circ$ that generates the data.…
We study oracle complexity of gradient based methods for stochastic approximation problems. Though in many settings optimal algorithms and tight lower bounds are known for such problems, these optimal algorithms do not achieve the best…
We consider the problem of minimizing a smooth, Lipschitz, convex function over a compact, convex set using sub-zeroth-order oracles: an oracle that outputs the sign of the directional derivative for a given point and a given direction, an…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
We consider the estimation of a structural function which models a non-parametric relationship between a response and an endogenous regressor given an instrument in presence of dependence in the data generating process. Assuming an…
We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…
We consider unconstrained stochastic optimization problems with no available gradient information. Such problems arise in settings from derivative-free simulation optimization to reinforcement learning. We propose an adaptive sampling…
We initiate the study of stochastic optimization with oblivious noise, broadly generalizing the standard heavy-tailed noise setup. In our setting, in addition to random observation noise, the stochastic gradient may be subject to…
During recent years the interest of optimization and machine learning communities in high-probability convergence of stochastic optimization methods has been growing. One of the main reasons for this is that high-probability complexity…
Motivated by the extensive application of approximate gradients in machine learning and optimization, we investigate inexact subgradient methods subject to persistent additive errors. Within a nonconvex semialgebraic framework, assuming…
Gradient estimation -- approximating the gradient of an expectation with respect to the parameters of a distribution -- is central to the solution of many machine learning problems. However, when the distribution is discrete, most common…
Recently, the information-theoretical framework has been proven to be able to obtain non-vacuous generalization bounds for large models trained by Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) with isotropic noise. In this paper, we optimize…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested experimentally for solving stochastic optimization problems in which the decision variables are constrained to satisfy equations defined by deterministic, smooth, and nonlinear functions. It is…