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Stochastic constraints, which incorporate both deterministic parameters and random variables, extend classical deterministic constraints by explicitly accounting for uncertainty. These constraints are increasingly prevalent in data science,…
Variance reduction techniques like SVRG provide simple and fast algorithms for optimizing a convex finite-sum objective. For nonconvex objectives, these techniques can also find a first-order stationary point (with small gradient). However,…
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. This point of view covers the stochastic gradient…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
In recent literature, a general two step procedure has been formulated for solving the problem of phase retrieval. First, a spectral technique is used to obtain a constant-error initial estimate, following which, the estimate is refined to…
Stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is an accelerated version of stochastic gradient descent based on variance reduction, and is promising for solving large-scale inverse problems. In this work, we analyze SVRG and a regularized…
In this paper, we consider multi-stage stochastic optimization problems with convex objectives and conic constraints at each stage. We present a new stochastic first-order method, namely the dynamic stochastic approximation (DSA) algorithm,…
This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…
This paper presents a novel stochastic gradient descent algorithm for constrained optimization. The proposed algorithm randomly samples constraints and components of the finite sum objective function and relies on a relaxed logarithmic…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
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…
First-order methods for stochastic optimization have undeniable relevance, in part due to their pivotal role in machine learning. Variance reduction for these algorithms has become an important research topic. In contrast to common…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a known stochastic iterative method popular for large-scale convex optimization problems due to its simple implementation and scalability. Some objectives, such as those found in complex-valued neural…
We study the stochastic optimization problem from a continuous-time perspective, with a focus on the Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum (SGDM) method. We show that the trajectory of SGDM, despite its \emph{stochastic} nature,…
This paper considers convex optimization problems where nodes of a network have access to summands of a global objective. Each of these local objectives is further assumed to be an average of a finite set of functions. The motivation for…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a key method used in statistical learning. Recently, its non-asymptotic convergence analysis has been considered in many papers. However, most of the prior analyses are made under restrictive assumptions…
We consider stochastic optimization of a smooth non-convex loss function with a convex non-smooth regularizer. In the online setting, where a single sample of the stochastic gradient of the loss is available at every iteration, the problem…