Related papers: A Single-Timescale Analysis For Stochastic Approxi…
In this article, we investigate the stochastic resonance (SR) effect in a finite array of noisy bistable systems with nearest-neighbor coupling driven by a weak time-periodic driving force. The array is characterized by a collective…
Sequence alignment supports numerous tasks in bioinformatics, natural language processing, pattern recognition, social sciences, and others fields. While the alignment of two sequences may be performed swiftly in many applications, the…
This paper focuses on finding approximate solutions to stochastic optimal control problems with control domains being not necessarily convex, where the state trajectory is subject to controlled stochastic differential equations. The…
Motivated by their broad applications in reinforcement learning, we study the linear two-time-scale stochastic approximation, an iterative method using two different step sizes for finding the solutions of a system of two equations. Our…
Given an ODE and its perturbation, the Alekseev formula expresses the solutions of the latter in terms related to the former. By exploiting this formula and a new concentration inequality for martingale-differences, we develop a novel…
In this paper, we consider non-convex stochastic bilevel optimization (SBO) problems that have many applications in machine learning. Although numerous studies have proposed stochastic algorithms for solving these problems, they are limited…
Finite-sum Coupled Compositional Optimization (FCCO), characterized by its coupled compositional objective structure, emerges as an important optimization paradigm for addressing a wide range of machine learning problems. In this paper, we…
Multi-step temporal-difference (TD) learning, where the update targets contain information from multiple time steps ahead, is one of the most popular forms of TD learning for linear function approximation. The reason is that multi-step…
Polyak-Ruppert averaging is a widely used technique to achieve the optimal asymptotic variance of stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms, yet its high-probability performance guarantees remain underexplored in general settings. In this…
Stochastic compositional optimization arises in many important machine learning tasks such as value function evaluation in reinforcement learning and portfolio management. The objective function is the composition of two expectations of…
Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms have been widely applied in minimization problems when the loss functions and/or the gradient information are only accessible through noisy evaluations. Stochastic gradient (SG) descent---a…
In this paper, we establish maximal concentration bounds for the iterates generated by a stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm under a contractive operator with respect to some arbitrary norm (for example, the $\ell_\infty$-norm). We…
We revisit the convergence analysis of constant stepsize stochastic approximation (SA) with decision-dependent Markovian noise, with a focus on characterizing the stationary bias against the root of the mean-field equation. We first…
Evolutionary modeling applications are the best way to provide full information to support in-depth understanding of evaluation of organisms. These applications mainly depend on identifying the evolutionary history of existing organisms and…
This paper is a study on solutions of the Sample Average Approximation Method to solve compound stochastic programs. We derive nonasymptotic upper estimates for probabilities of the approximation errors. The results depend on the sample…
Recent years have seen an increasing use of Signal Temporal Logic (STL) as a formal specification language for symbolic control, due to its expressiveness and closeness to natural language. Furthermore, STL specifications can be encoded as…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
In this paper, we study the almost sure boundedness and the convergence of the stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm. At present, most available convergence proofs are based on the ODE method, and the almost sure boundedness of the…
Stochastic bilevel optimization generalizes the classic stochastic optimization from the minimization of a single objective to the minimization of an objective function that depends the solution of another optimization problem. Recently,…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…