Related papers: Formalization of a Stochastic Approximation Theore…

In this work, we generalized and unified recent two completely different works of Jascha \cite{sohl2014fast} and Lee \cite{lee2012proximal} respectively into one by proposing the \textbf{prox}imal s\textbf{to}chastic \textbf{N}ewton-type…

This work is concerned with the analysis of a stochastic approximation algorithm for the simulation of quasi-stationary distributions on finite state spaces. This is a generalization of a method introduced by Aldous, Flannery and Palacios.…

Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…

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…

We investigate statistical properties of the optimal value of the Sample Average Approximation of stochastic programs, continuing the study in Kr\"atschmer (2023). Central Limit Theorem type results are derived for the optimal value. As a…

This paper investigates the stability and convergence properties of asynchronous stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms, with a focus on extensions relevant to average-reward reinforcement learning. We first extend a stability proof…

Stochastic saddle point (SSP) problems are, in general, less studied compared to stochastic minimization problems. However, SSP problems emerge from machine learning (adversarial training, e.g., GAN, AUC maximization), statistics (robust…

In spite of the accomplishments of deep learning based algorithms in numerous applications and very broad corresponding research interest, at the moment there is still no rigorous understanding of the reasons why such algorithms produce…

The stochastic Frank-Wolfe method has recently attracted much general interest in the context of optimization for statistical and machine learning due to its ability to work with a more general feasible region. However, there has been a…

We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…

Low-rank approximation is a fundamental technique in modern data analysis, widely utilized across various fields such as signal processing, machine learning, and natural language processing. Despite its ubiquity, the mechanics of low-rank…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…

We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…

As we know, some global optimization problems cannot be solved using analytic methods, so numeric/algorithmic approaches are used to find near to the optimal solutions for them. A stochastic global optimization algorithm (SGoal) is an…

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…

We propose a Randomized Progressive Training algorithm (RPT) -- a stochastic proxy for the well-known Progressive Training method (PT) (Karras et al., 2017). Originally designed to train GANs (Goodfellow et al., 2014), PT was proposed as a…

Although deep learning based approximation algorithms have been applied very successfully to numerous problems, at the moment the reasons for their performance are not entirely understood from a mathematical point of view. Recently,…

In this paper, we propose and analyse a family of generalised stochastic composite mirror descent algorithms. With adaptive step sizes, the proposed algorithms converge without requiring prior knowledge of the problem. Combined with an…

Stochastic approximation algorithms have been the subject of an enormous body of literature, both theoretical and applied. Recently, Laruelle and Pag\`es (2013) presented a link between the stochastic approximation and response-adaptive…