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We address the problem of minimizing a smooth function $f^0(x)$ over a compact set $D$ defined by smooth functional constraints $f^i(x)\leq 0,~ i = 1,\ldots, m$ given noisy value measurements of $f^i(x)$. This problem arises in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-20 Ilnura Usmanova , Andreas Krause , Maryam Kamgarpour

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm in machine learning, particularly for neural network training. Recent studies on SGD for canonical quadratic optimization or linear regression show it attains well generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Haihan Zhang , Yuanshi Liu , Qianwen Chen , Cong Fang

We introduce biased gradient oracles to capture a setting where the function measurements have an estimation error that can be controlled through a batch size parameter. Our proposed oracles are appealing in several practical contexts, for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Nirav Bhavsar , Prashanth L. A

Algorithmic stability is an important notion that has proven powerful for deriving generalization bounds for practical algorithms. The last decade has witnessed an increasing number of stability bounds for different algorithms applied on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-31 Lingjiong Zhu , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Anant Raj , Umut Simsekli

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-16 Stephan Wojtowytsch

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm for constrained Markov decision processes with a safety constraint. Despite the necessary attention of the scientific community, considering stochastic stopping time, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Abhijit Mazumdar , Rafal Wisniewski , Manuela L. Bujorianu

We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Haiping Huang , Taro Toyoizumi

The vast majority of successful deep neural networks are trained using variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms. Recent attempts to improve SGD can be broadly categorized into two approaches: (1) adaptive learning rate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-04 Michael R. Zhang , James Lucas , Geoffrey Hinton , Jimmy Ba

The use of low-bit quantization has emerged as an indispensable technique for enabling the efficient training of large-scale models. Despite its widespread empirical success, a rigorous theoretical understanding of its impact on learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-17 Dechen Zhang , Junwei Su , Difan Zou

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a pillar of modern machine learning, serving as the go-to optimization algorithm for a diverse array of problems. While the empirical success of SGD is often attributed to its computational efficiency…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Courtney Paquette , Elliot Paquette , Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the workhorse algorithm of deep learning technology. At each step of the training phase, a mini batch of samples is drawn from the training dataset and the weights of the neural network are adjusted…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2022-09-07 Francesca Mignacco , Pierfrancesco Urbani

In safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the objective is to develop a policy that maximizes cumulative rewards while strictly adhering to safety constraints, utilizing only offline data. Traditional methods often face difficulties in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prajwal Koirala , Zhanhong Jiang , Soumik Sarkar , Cody Fleming

This paper introduces a new formulation for stochastic optimal control and stochastic dynamic optimization that ensures safety with respect to state and control constraints. The proposed methodology brings together concepts such as…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-02-19 Marcus Aloysius Pereira , Ziyi Wang , Ioannis Exarchos , Evangelos A. Theodorou

In reinforcement learning (RL), offline learning decoupled learning from data collection and is useful in dealing with exploration-exploitation tradeoff and enables data reuse in many applications. In this work, we study two offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Jing Dong , Xin T. Tong

Stochastic first-order methods for empirical risk minimization employ gradient approximations based on sampled data in lieu of exact gradients. Such constructions introduce noise into the learning dynamics, which can be corrected through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Sean Xiao , Sangwoo Park , Stefan Vlaski

Modern machine learning algorithms aim to extract fine-grained information from data to provide accurate predictions, which often conflicts with the goal of privacy protection. This paper addresses the practical and theoretical importance…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-17 Puyu Wang , Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying , Ding-Xuan Zhou

In safety-critical domains, reinforcement learning (RL) agents must often satisfy strict, zero-cost safety constraints while accomplishing tasks. Existing model-free methods frequently either fail to achieve near-zero safety violations or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Dominik Wagner , Ankit Kanwar , Luke Ong

This paper considers the problem of solving constrained reinforcement learning problems with anytime guarantees, meaning that the algorithmic solution returns a safe policy regardless of when it is terminated. Drawing inspiration from…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-18 Pol Mestres , Arnau Marzabal , Jorge Cortés

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is commonly used for optimization in large-scale machine learning problems. Langford et al. (2009) introduce a sparse online learning method to induce sparsity via truncated gradient. With high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-10 Yuting Ma , Tian Zheng