Related papers: Sample Average Approximation of Conditional Value-…
Variational inference (VI) is widely used for approximate inference in Bayesian machine learning. In addition to this practical success, generalization bounds for variational inference and related algorithms have been developed, mostly…
We consider an online stochastic game with risk-averse agents whose goal is to learn optimal decisions that minimize the risk of incurring significantly high costs. Specifically, we use the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) as a risk measure…
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…
Given an intractable target density $p$, variational inference (VI) attempts to find the best approximation $q$ from a tractable family $Q$. This is typically done by minimizing the exclusive Kullback-Leibler divergence, $\text{KL}(q||p)$.…
The quasi-variational inequalities play a significant role in analyzing a wide range of real-world problems. However, these problems are more complicated to solve than variational inequalities as the constraint set is based on the current…
We study a risk-constrained version of the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem, where the risk measure considered is Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). We propose two algorithms that obtain a locally risk-optimal policy by employing four…
In variational inference (VI), the practitioner approximates a high-dimensional distribution $\pi$ with a simple surrogate one, often a (product) Gaussian distribution. However, in many cases of practical interest, Gaussian distributions…
We study a first-order primal-dual subgradient method to optimize risk-constrained risk-penalized optimization problems, where risk is modeled via the popular conditional value at risk (CVaR) measure. The algorithm processes independent and…
The ability to make optimal decisions under uncertainty remains important across a variety of disciplines from portfolio management to power engineering. This generally implies applying some safety margins on uncertain parameters that may…
Cross-validation (CV) is one of the most popular tools for assessing and selecting predictive models. However, standard CV suffers from high computational cost when the number of folds is large. Recently, under the empirical risk…
This paper addresses risk averse constrained optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions can only be computed by a blackbox subject to unknown uncertainties. To handle mixed aleatory/epistemic uncertainties, the…
Conditional value at risk (CVaR) is a popular measure for quantifying portfolio risk. Sensitivity analysis of CVaR is very useful in risk management and gradient-based optimization algorithms. In this paper, we study the infinitesimal…
We study statistical properties of the optimal value of the Sample Average Approximation. The focus is on the tail function of the absolute error induced by the Sample Average Approximation, deriving upper estimates of its outcomes…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
Mean field variational inference (VI) is the problem of finding the closest product (factorized) measure, in the sense of relative entropy, to a given high-dimensional probability measure $\rho$. The well known Coordinate Ascent Variational…
Variational inequalities (VIs) are a broad class of optimization problems encompassing machine learning problems ranging from standard convex minimization to more complex scenarios like min-max optimization and computing the equilibria of…
The problem of estimating a random vector x from noisy linear measurements y = A x + w with unknown parameters on the distributions of x and w, which must also be learned, arises in a wide range of statistical learning and linear inverse…
In this paper, we study a very general stochastic variational inequality(SVI) having jumps, random coefficients, delay, and path dependence, in infinite dimensions. Well-posedness in terms of the existence and uniqueness of a solution is…
Variational inference (VI) has emerged as a popular method for approximate inference for high-dimensional Bayesian models. In this paper, we propose a novel VI method that extends the naive mean field via entropic regularization, referred…
We consider the closely related problems of sampling from a distribution known up to a normalizing constant, and estimating said normalizing constant. We show how variational autoencoders (VAEs) can be applied to this task. In their…