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We consider minimization of stochastic functionals that are compositions of a (potentially) non-smooth convex function $h$ and smooth function $c$ and, more generally, stochastic weakly-convex functionals. We develop a family of stochastic…
We propose a novel study of the stochastic proximal gradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth. Under suitable assumptions and without requiring any boundedness or control of the variance of the…
To model combinatorial decision problems involving uncertainty and probability, we introduce stochastic constraint programming. Stochastic constraint programs contain both decision variables (which we can set) and stochastic variables…
The stochastic subgradient method is a widely-used algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems arising in machine learning. Often these problems are neither smooth nor convex. Recently, Davis et al. [1-2] characterized the…
We consider minimization of functions that are compositions of convex or prox-regular functions (possibly extended-valued) with smooth vector functions. A wide variety of important optimization problems fall into this framework. We describe…
Submodular maximization has been a central topic in theoretical computer science and combinatorial optimization over the last decades. Plenty of well-performed approximation algorithms have been designed for the problem over a variety of…
Optimization problems involving sequential decisions in a stochastic environment were studied in Stochastic Programming (SP), Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In this paper we mainly concentrate on SP…
Stochastic Approximation has been a prominent set of tools for solving problems with noise and uncertainty. Increasingly, it becomes important to solve optimization problems wherein there is noise in both a set of constraints that a…
Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a powerful framework from convex optimization that has striking potential for data science applications. This paper develops a provably correct randomized algorithm for solving large, weakly constrained SDP…
The stochastic proximal gradient method is a powerful generalization of the widely used stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and has found numerous applications in Machine Learning. However, it is notoriously known that this method…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic method for solving equality constrained optimization problems that utilizes predictive variance reduction. Specifically, we develop a method based on the sequential quadratic programming paradigm that…
In this work, we consider constrained stochastic optimization problems under hidden convexity, i.e., those that admit a convex reformulation via non-linear (but invertible) map $c(\cdot)$. A number of non-convex problems ranging from…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…
This paper studies consensus-based decentralized stochastic optimization for minimizing possibly non-convex expected objectives with convex non-smooth regularizers and nonlinear functional inequality constraints. We reformulate the…
In this paper we propose two algorithms in the tabular setting and an algorithm for the function approximation setting for the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem. SSP problems form an important class of problems in Reinforcement…
For many applications in signal processing and machine learning, we are tasked with minimizing a large sum of convex functions subject to a large number of convex constraints. In this paper, we devise a new random projection method (RPM) to…
In this work, we consider convex optimization problems with smooth objective function and nonsmooth functional constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called Stochastic Halfspace Approximation Method (SHAM), to solve…
This paper focuses on investigating an inexact stochastic model-based optimization algorithm that integrates preconditioning techniques for solving stochastic composite optimization problems. The proposed framework unifies and extends the…
In this paper, we introduce an unbiased gradient simulation algorithms for solving convex optimization problem with stochastic function compositions. We show that the unbiased gradient generated from the algorithm has finite variance and…
Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…