Related papers: Adaptive Sampling Quasi-Newton Methods for Zeroth-…
In stochastic optimization, a common tool to deal sequentially with large sample is to consider the well-known stochastic gradient algorithm. Nevertheless, since the stepsequence is the same for each direction, this can lead to bad results…
In this paper, we present a generic framework to extend existing uniformly optimal convex programming algorithms to solve more general nonlinear, possibly nonconvex, optimization problems. The basic idea is to incorporate a local search…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
Non linear regression models are a standard tool for modeling real phenomena, with several applications in machine learning, ecology, econometry... Estimating the parameters of the model has garnered a lot of attention during many years. We…
In this paper, we propose new methods to efficiently solve convex optimization problems encountered in sparse estimation, which include a new quasi-Newton method that avoids computing the Hessian matrix and improves efficiency, and we prove…
We study unconstrained optimization problems with nonsmooth and convex objective function in the form of a mathematical expectation. The proposed method approximates the expected objective function with a sample average function using…
We consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In the context of most machine learning applications, each loss function is non-negative and thus can be expressed as the…
We describe an adaptive importance sampling algorithm for rare events that is based on a dual stochastic control formulation of a path sampling problem. Specifically, we focus on path functionals that have the form of cumulate generating…
This paper considers non-smooth optimization problems where we seek to minimize the pointwise maximum of a continuously parameterized family of functions. Since the objective function is given as the solution to a maximization problem,…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
Optimization problems with the objective function in the form of weighted sum and linear equality constraints are considered. Given that the number of local cost functions can be large as well as the number of constraints, a stochastic…
Stochastic optimization methods encounter new challenges in the realm of streaming, characterized by a continuous flow of large, high-dimensional data. While first-order methods, like stochastic gradient descent, are the natural choice,…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
Policy gradient algorithms are widely used in reinforcement learning and belong to the class of approximate dynamic programming methods. This paper studies two key policy gradient algorithms, the Natural Policy Gradient and the Gauss-Newton…
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…
In this article, we propose a quasi-Newton method for unconstrained set optimization problems to find its weakly minimal solutions with respect to lower set-less ordering. The set-valued objective mapping under consideration is given by a…
We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…
Using quasi-Newton methods in stochastic optimization is not a trivial task given the difficulty of extracting curvature information from the noisy gradients. Moreover, pre-conditioning noisy gradient observations tend to amplify the noise.…
Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population respond to a deployed classifier by manipulating their features…
For solving large-scale non-convex problems, we propose inexact variants of trust region and adaptive cubic regularization methods, which, to increase efficiency, incorporate various approximations. In particular, in addition to approximate…