Related papers: Learning with Stochastic Orders
First-order stochastic methods are the state-of-the-art in large-scale machine learning optimization owing to efficient per-iteration complexity. Second-order methods, while able to provide faster convergence, have been much less explored…
We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…
Stochastic neural networks are a prototypical computational device able to build a probabilistic representation of an ensemble of external stimuli. Building on the relationship between inference and learning, we derive a synaptic plasticity…
Stochastic optimization finds a wide range of applications in operations research and management science. However, existing stochastic optimization techniques usually require the information of random samples (e.g., demands in the…
In this work, multiplicative stochasticity is applied to the learning rate of stochastic optimization algorithms, giving rise to stochastic learning-rate schemes. In-expectation theoretical convergence results of Stochastic Gradient Descent…
We investigate Monte Carlo based algorithms for solving stochastic control problems with probabilistic constraints. Our motivation comes from microgrid management, where the controller tries to optimally dispatch a diesel generator while…
Comparison of two univariate distributions based on independent samples from them is a fundamental problem in statistics, with applications in a wide variety of scientific disciplines. In many situations, we might hypothesize that the two…
In this paper, we adopt a probability distribution estimation perspective to explore the optimization mechanisms of supervised classification using deep neural networks. We demonstrate that, when employing the Fenchel-Young loss, despite…
We consider stochastic optimization when one only has access to biased stochastic oracles of the objective and the gradient, and obtaining stochastic gradients with low biases comes at high costs. This setting captures various optimization…
Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…
Stochastic localization is a pathwise analysis technique originating from convex geometry. This paper explores certain algorithmic aspects of stochastic localization as a computational tool. First, we unify various existing stochastic…
Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling methods provide a mechanism for defining distant proposals with high acceptance probabilities in a Metropolis-Hastings framework, enabling more efficient exploration of the state space than standard…
Researchers are often interested in drawing inferences regarding the order between two experimental groups on the basis of multivariate response data. Since standard multivariate methods are designed for two-sided alternatives, they may not…
Stochastic coordinate descent algorithms are efficient methods in which each iterate is obtained by fixing most coordinates at their values from the current iteration, and approximately minimizing the objective with respect to the remaining…
Motivated by machine learning applications in networks of sensors, internet-of-things (IoT) devices, and autonomous agents, we propose techniques for distributed stochastic convex learning from high-rate data streams. The setup involves a…
In various practical situations, we encounter data from stochastic processes which can be efficiently modelled by an appropriate parametric model for subsequent statistical analyses. Unfortunately, the most common estimation and inference…
Probabilistic constellation shaping enables easy rate adaption and has been proven to reduce the gap to Shannon capacity. Constellation point probabilities are optimized to maximize either the mutual information or the bit-wise mutual…
The study of optimal control problems under uncertainty plays an important role in scientific numerical simulations. This class of optimization problems is strongly utilized in engineering, biology and finance. In this paper, a stochastic…
In this paper we introduce a class of novel distributed algorithms for solving stochastic big-data convex optimization problems over directed graphs. In the addressed set-up, the dimension of the decision variable can be extremely high and…
Large-scale optimization problems require algorithms both effective and efficient. One such popular and proven algorithm is Stochastic Gradient Descent which uses first-order gradient information to solve these problems. This paper studies…