Related papers: Formalization of a Stochastic Approximation Theore…
Two-time-scale stochastic approximation, a generalized version of the popular stochastic approximation, has found broad applications in many areas including stochastic control, optimization, and machine learning. Despite its popularity,…
Motivated by applications in reinforcement learning (RL), we study a nonlinear stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm under Markovian noise, and establish its finite-sample convergence bounds under various stepsizes. Specifically, we show…
We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…
Stochastic gradient methods are among the most important algorithms in training machine learning problems. While classical assumptions such as strong convexity allow a simple analysis they are rarely satisfied in applications. In recent…
A stochastic algorithm is proposed, finding the set of generalized means associated to a probability measure on a compact Riemannian manifold M and a continuous cost function on the product of M by itself. Generalized means include p-means…
We prove that stochastic gradient descent efficiently converges to the global optimizer of the maximum likelihood objective of an unknown linear time-invariant dynamical system from a sequence of noisy observations generated by the system.…
In the context of finite sums minimization, variance reduction techniques are widely used to improve the performance of state-of-the-art stochastic gradient methods. Their practical impact is clear, as well as their theoretical properties.…
In this paper we study the problem of convergence and generalization error bound of stochastic momentum for deep learning from the perspective of regularization. To do so, we first interpret momentum as solving an $\ell_2$-regularized…
In this paper we measured the stability of stochastic gradient method (SGM) for learning an approximated Fourier primal support vector machine. The stability of an algorithm is considered by measuring the generalization error in terms of…
Conformal predictors are machine learning algorithms developed in the 1990's by Gammerman, Vovk, and their research team, to provide set predictions with guaranteed confidence level. Over recent years, they have grown in popularity and have…
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…
In a pioneer work, R\'ev\'esz (1973) introduces the stochastic approximation method to build up a recursive kernel estimator of the regression function $x\mapsto E(Y|X=x)$. However, according to R\'ev\'esz (1977), his estimator has two main…
Lloyd's algorithm is an iterative method that solves the quantization problem, i.e. the approximation of a target probability measure by a discrete one, and is particularly used in digital applications. This algorithm can be interpreted as…
Boosting is a popular way to derive powerful learners from simpler hypothesis classes. Following previous work (Mason et al., 1999; Friedman, 2000) on general boosting frameworks, we analyze gradient-based descent algorithms for boosting…
We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained.…
We introduce deterministic perturbation schemes for the recently proposed random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA) [17], and propose new first-order and second-order algorithms. In the latter case, these are the first second-order…
We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…
We consider stochastic approximation with block-coordinate stepsizes and propose adaptive stepsize rules that aim to minimize the expected distance from the next iterate to an (unknown) target point. These stepsize rules employ online…
We consider the problem of fitting variational posterior approximations using stochastic optimization methods. The performance of these approximations depends on (1) how well the variational family matches the true posterior…
In this paper, we study a class of bilevel programming problem where the inner objective function is strongly convex. More specifically, under some mile assumptions on the partial derivatives of both inner and outer objective functions, we…