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This paper introduces time-continuous numerical schemes to simulate stochastic differential equations (SDEs) arising in mathematical finance, population dynamics, chemical kinetics, epidemiology, biophysics, and polymeric fluids. These…
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,…
Stochastic contraction analysis is a recently developed tool for studying the global stability properties of nonlinear stochastic systems, based on a differential analysis of convergence in an appropriate metric. To date, stochastic…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…
This paper develops a unified framework, based on iterated random operator theory, to analyze the convergence of constant stepsize recursive stochastic algorithms (RSAs). RSAs use randomization to efficiently compute expectations, and so…
Stochastic gradient methods enable learning probabilistic models from large amounts of data. While large step-sizes (learning rates) have shown to be best for least-squares (e.g., Gaussian noise) once combined with parameter averaging,…
This paper presents new sufficient conditions for convergence and asymptotic or exponential stability of a stochastic discrete-time system, under which the constructed Lyapunov function always decreases in expectation along the system's…
The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…
The strong growth condition (SGC) is known to be a sufficient condition for linear convergence of the stochastic gradient method using a constant step-size $\gamma$ (SGM-CS). In this paper, we provide a necessary condition, for the linear…
The convergence behavior of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) crucially depends on the stepsize configuration. When using a constant stepsize, the SGD iterates form a Markov chain, enjoying fast convergence during the initial transient…
Stochastic gradient descent is a canonical tool for addressing stochastic optimization problems, and forms the bedrock of modern machine learning and statistics. In this work, we seek to balance the fact that attenuating step-size is…
In this paper, we study numerical approximations for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) that use adaptive step sizes. In particular, we consider a general setting where decisions to reduce step sizes are allowed to depend on the…
We investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…
Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…
The tuning of stochastic gradient algorithms (SGAs) for optimization and sampling is often based on heuristics and trial-and-error rather than generalizable theory. We address this theory--practice gap by characterizing the large-sample…
We consider the dynamics of a linear stochastic approximation algorithm driven by Markovian noise, and derive finite-time bounds on the moments of the error, i.e., deviation of the output of the algorithm from the equilibrium point of an…
Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large scale optimization of machine learning objective functions. Yet, its performance is greatly variable and heavily depends on the choice of the stepsizes. This has motivated a…
Stochastic variance reduced methods have shown strong performance in solving finite-sum problems. However, these methods usually require the users to manually tune the step-size, which is time-consuming or even infeasible for some…
This paper proposes a thorough theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with non-increasing step sizes. First, we show that the recursion defining SGD can be provably approximated by solutions of a time inhomogeneous…
We study stochastic approximation procedures for approximately solving a $d$-dimensional linear fixed point equation based on observing a trajectory of length $n$ from an ergodic Markov chain. We first exhibit a non-asymptotic bound of the…