Related papers: Accelerating Optimization and Reinforcement Learni…

Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…

We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of…

We establish the O($\frac{1}{k}$) convergence rate for distributed stochastic gradient methods that operate over strongly convex costs and random networks. The considered class of methods is standard each node performs a weighted average of…

Stochastic composition optimization draws much attention recently and has been successful in many emerging applications of machine learning, statistical analysis, and reinforcement learning. In this paper, we focus on the composition…

Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ oracle complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary…

The problem of minimizing the maximum of $N$ convex, Lipschitz functions plays significant roles in optimization and machine learning. It has a series of results, with the most recent one requiring $O(N\epsilon^{-2/3} + \epsilon^{-8/3})$…

We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…

We consider minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function using a stochastic Newton method. At each iteration, the algorithm is given an oracle access to a stochastic estimate of the Hessian matrix. The oracle model includes…

We consider an agent trying to bring a system to an acceptable state by repeated probabilistic action. Several recent works on algorithmizations of the Lovasz Local Lemma (LLL) can be seen as establishing sufficient conditions for the agent…

A standard way to obtain convergence guarantees in stochastic convex optimization is to run an online learning algorithm and then output the average of its iterates: the actual iterates of the online learning algorithm do not come with…

We consider the problem of asynchronous stochastic optimization, where an optimization algorithm makes updates based on stale stochastic gradients of the objective that are subject to an arbitrary (possibly adversarial) sequence of delays.…

This paper studies a method, which has been proposed in the Physics literature by [8, 7, 10], for estimating the quasi-stationary distribution. In contrast to existing methods in eigenvector estimation, the method eliminates the need for…

We propose a method that achieves near-optimal rates for smooth stochastic convex optimization and requires essentially no prior knowledge of problem parameters. This improves on prior work which requires knowing at least the initial…

Phase retrieval (PR) is a popular research topic in signal processing and machine learning. However, its performance degrades significantly when the measurements are corrupted by noise or outliers. To address this limitation, we propose a…

We study the unconstrained minimization of a smooth and strongly convex population loss function under a stochastic oracle that introduces both additive and multiplicative noise; this is a canonical and widely-studied setting that arises…

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 $p > 1$.…

We study realizable continual linear regression under random task orderings, a common setting for developing continual learning theory. In this setup, the worst-case expected loss after $k$ learning iterations admits a lower bound of…

Stochastic gradient methods are among the most important algorithms in training machine learning problems. While classical assumptions such as strong convexity allow a simple analysis they are rarely satisfied in applications. In recent…

Traditional algorithms for stochastic optimization require projecting the solution at each iteration into a given domain to ensure its feasibility. When facing complex domains, such as positive semi-definite cones, the projection operation…

Mini-batch optimization has proven to be a powerful paradigm for large-scale learning. However, the state of the art parallel mini-batch algorithms assume synchronous operation or cyclic update orders. When worker nodes are heterogeneous…