Related papers: A Single-Timescale Analysis For Stochastic Approxi…
Monotone inclusions have a wide range of applications, including minimization, saddle-point, and equilibria problems. We introduce new stochastic algorithms, with or without variance reduction, to estimate a root of the expectation of…
Motivated by applications in large-scale and multi-agent reinforcement learning, we study the non-asymptotic performance of stochastic approximation (SA) schemes with delayed updates under Markovian sampling. While the effect of delays has…
SARSA is an on-policy algorithm to learn a Markov decision process policy in reinforcement learning. We investigate the SARSA algorithm with linear function approximation under the non-i.i.d.\ data, where a single sample trajectory is…
Stochastic Bilevel optimization usually involves minimizing an upper-level (UL) function that is dependent on the arg-min of a strongly-convex lower-level (LL) function. Several algorithms utilize Neumann series to approximate certain…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a classical approach for stochastic convex optimization. Previous studies have demonstrated that the convergence rate of SA can be improved by introducing either smoothness or strong convexity condition. In…
While stochastic bilevel optimization methods have been extensively studied for addressing large-scale nested optimization problems in machine learning, it remains an open question whether the optimal complexity bounds for solving bilevel…
Many machine learning and optimization algorithms can be cast as instances of stochastic approximation (SA). The convergence rate of these algorithms is known to be slow, with the optimal mean squared error (MSE) of order $O(n^{-1})$. In…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a key method used in statistical learning. Recently, its non-asymptotic convergence analysis has been considered in many papers. However, most of the prior analyses are made under restrictive assumptions…
Multiple sequence alignment (MSA) has been one of the most important problems in bioinformatics for more decades and it is still heavily examined by many mathematicians and biologists. However, mostly because of the practical motivation of…
Stochastic Bilevel Optimization has emerged as a fundamental framework for meta-learning and hyperparameter optimization. Despite the practical prevalence of single-loop algorithms--which update lower and upper variables concurrently--their…
The Method of Successive Approximations (MSA) is a fixed-point iterative method used to solve stochastic optimal control problems. It is an indirect method based on the conditions derived from the Stochastic Maximum Principle (SMP), an…
We are interested in understanding stability (almost sure boundedness) of stochastic approximation algorithms (SAs) driven by a `controlled Markov' process. Analyzing this class of algorithms is important, since many reinforcement learning…
This paper studies stochastic optimization for a sum of compositional functions, where the inner-level function of each summand is coupled with the corresponding summation index. We refer to this family of problems as finite-sum coupled…
This paper proposes a new family of algorithms for training neural networks (NNs). These are based on recent developments in the field of non-convex optimization, going under the general name of successive convex approximation (SCA)…
Large sectors of the recent optimization literature focused in the last decade on the development of optimal stochastic first order schemes for constrained convex models under progressively relaxed assumptions. Stochastic proximal point is…
This paper studies the control-oriented identification problem of set-valued moving average systems with uniform persistent excitations and observation noises. A stochastic approximation-based (SA-based) algorithm without projections or…
Motivated by Q-learning, we study nonsmooth contractive stochastic approximation (SA) with constant stepsize. We focus on two important classes of dynamics: 1) nonsmooth contractive SA with additive noise, and 2) synchronous and…
Time series aggregation (TSA) aims to construct temporally aggregated optimization models that accurately represent the output space of their full-scale counterparts while using a significantly reduced temporal dimensionality. This paper…
In this paper, we study smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization problems, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions. We assume access to noisy evaluations of the functions and their gradients,…
We give in this paper a convergence result concerning parallel asynchronous algorithm with bounded delays to solve a nonlinear fixed point problems. This result is applied to calculate the solution of a strongly monotone operator. Special…