Related papers: Sample Average Approximation for Stochastic Optimi…
We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…
Optimal stopping is the problem of deciding when to stop a stochastic system to obtain the greatest reward, arising in numerous application areas such as finance, healthcare and marketing. State-of-the-art methods for high-dimensional…
Trajectory optimization under uncertainty underpins a wide range of applications in robotics. However, existing methods are limited in terms of reasoning about sources of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty, space and time correlations,…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of an operator using noisy samples and widely used in optimization and Reinforcement Learning (RL). The noise in RL exhibits a Markovian structure, and in…
We investigate the Randomized Stochastic Accelerated Gradient (RSAG) method, utilizing either constant or adaptive step sizes, for stochastic optimization problems with generalized smooth objective functions. Under relaxed affine variance…
This article deals with stochastic processes endowed with the Markov (memoryless) property and evolving over general (uncountable) state spaces. The models further depend on a non-deterministic quantity in the form of a control input, which…
Despite the recent growth of theoretical studies and empirical successes of neural networks, gradient backpropagation is still the most widely used algorithm for training such networks. On the one hand, we have deterministic or full…
We consider the solution of finite-sum minimization problems, such as those appearing in nonlinear least-squares or general empirical risk minimization problems. We are motivated by problems in which the summand functions are…
We explore the performance of sample average approximation in comparison with several other methods for stochastic optimization when there is information available on the underlying true probability distribution. The methods we evaluate are…
We study the problem of optimizing a function under a \emph{budgeted number of evaluations}. We only assume that the function is \emph{locally} smooth around one of its global optima. The difficulty of optimization is measured in terms of…
We present a probabilistic model for stochastic iterative algorithms with the use case of optimization algorithms in mind. Based on this model, we present PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for functions that are defined on the trajectory…
This paper presents the first sufficient conditions that guarantee the stability and almost sure convergence of multi-timescale stochastic approximation (SA) iterates. It extends the existing results on one-timescale and two-timescale SA…
The growing prevalence of nonsmooth optimization problems in machine learning has spurred significant interest in generalized smoothness assumptions. Among these, the (L0, L1)-smoothness assumption has emerged as one of the most prominent.…
We provide a novel computer-assisted technique for systematically analyzing first-order methods for optimization. In contrast with previous works, the approach is particularly suited for handling sublinear convergence rates and stochastic…
Stochastic variance-reduced algorithms such as Stochastic Average Gradient (SAG) and SAGA, and their deterministic counterparts like the Incremental Aggregated Gradient (IAG) method, have been extensively studied in large-scale machine…
In performative prediction, the choice of a model influences the distribution of future data, typically through actions taken based on the model's predictions. We initiate the study of stochastic optimization for performative prediction.…
We present the parallel and interacting stochastic approximation annealing (PISAA) algorithm, a stochastic simulation procedure for global optimisation, that extends and improves the stochastic approximation annealing (SAA) by using…
When Perturbation Analysis (PA) yields unbiased sensitivity estimators for expected-value performance functions in discrete event dynamic systems, it can be used for performance optimization of those functions. However, when PA is known to…
Stochastic optimization of the Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve (AUPRC) is a crucial problem for machine learning. Although various algorithms have been extensively studied for AUPRC optimization, the generalization is only guaranteed…
Phenomenon of stochastic separability was revealed and used in machine learning to correct errors of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and analyze AI instabilities. In high-dimensional datasets under broad assumptions each point can be…