Related papers: Hessian Estimation via Stein's Identity in Black-B…
We present a numerical method for the approximation of solutions for the class of stochastic differential equations driven by Brownian motions which induce stochastic variation in fixed directions. This class of equations arises naturally…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is one key technique for machine learning problems where gradient calculation is expensive or impossible. Several variance reduced ZO proximal algorithms have been proposed to speed up ZO optimization for…
Multivariate global polynomial approximations - such as polynomial chaos or stochastic collocation methods - are now in widespread use for sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification. The pseudospectral variety of these methods uses…
We develop a range-separated stochastic resolution of identity approach for the $4$-index electron repulsion integrals, where the larger terms (above a predefined threshold) are treated using a deterministic resolution of identity and the…
We present Zeroth-order Riemannian Averaging Stochastic Approximation (\texttt{Zo-RASA}) algorithms for stochastic optimization on Riemannian manifolds. We show that \texttt{Zo-RASA} achieves optimal sample complexities for generating…
Gradient descent is the primary workhorse for optimizing large-scale problems in machine learning. However, its performance is highly sensitive to the choice of the learning rate. A key limitation of gradient descent is its lack of natural…
Simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) is an approach to gradient-free optimization introduced by Spall as a simplification of the approach of Kiefer and Wolfowitz. In many cases the most attractive option is the…
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…
In this paper, we consider the numerical approximation of a general second order semilinear stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) driven by multiplicative and additive noise. Our main interest is on such SPDEs where the nonlinear…
We develop and analyze several different second-order algorithms for computing a near-optimal solution path of a convex parametric optimization problem with smooth Hessian. Our algorithms are inspired by a differential equation perspective…
In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting and saddle-point avoiding. To handle…
Two-time-scale optimization is a framework introduced in Zeng et al. (2024) that abstracts a range of policy evaluation and policy optimization problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Akin to bi-level optimization under a particular type…
In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…
Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in system optimization problems when only noisy measurements of the system are available. This paper studies two types of SA algorithms in a multivariate Kiefer-Wolfowitz setting:…
This paper introduces a novel Homogeneous Second-order Descent Ascent (HSDA) algorithm for nonconvex-strongly concave minimax optimization problems. At each iteration, HSDA uniquely computes a search direction by solving a homogenized…
Novel fully discrete schemes are developed to numerically approximate a semilinear stochastic wave equation driven by additive space-time white noise. Spectral Galerkin method is proposed for the spatial discretization, and exponential time…
In this paper, we discuss the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: a smooth function plus a non-smooth function. Further, the smooth part can be expressed by the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and…
We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…
When solving linear stochastic differential equations numerically, usually a high order spatial discretisation is used. Balanced truncation (BT) and singular perturbation approximation (SPA) are well-known projection techniques in the…
Two-stage stochastic optimization is a framework for modeling uncertainty, where we have a probability distribution over possible realizations of the data, called scenarios, and decisions are taken in two stages: we make first-stage…