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Minimax optimization has served as the backbone of many machine learning (ML) problems. Although the convergence behavior of optimization algorithms has been extensively studied in the minimax settings, their generalization guarantees in…
Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…
In order to model risk aversion in reinforcement learning, an emerging line of research adapts familiar algorithms to optimize coherent risk functionals, a class that includes conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). Because optimizing the…
Understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants is essential for machine learning. However, most of the preceding analyses are conducted under amenable conditions such as unbiased gradient estimator and bounded objective…
The constrained gradient method (CGM) has recently been proposed to solve convex optimization and monotone variational inequality (VI) problems with general functional constraints. While existing literature has established convergence…
We study first-order algorithms that are uniformly stable for empirical risk minimization (ERM) problems that are convex and smooth with respect to $p$-norms, $p \geq 1$. We propose a black-box reduction method that, by employing properties…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been increasingly popular in Bayesian learning due to its ability to deal with large data. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples from a discretized-time Markov chain to…
We consider a large family of discrete and continuous time controlled Markov processes and study an ergodic risk-sensitive minimization problem. Under a blanket stability assumption, we provide a complete analysis to this problem. In…
We study nonconvex stochastic optimization under the Blum-Gladyshev ($\mathsf{BG}$-0) noise model, where the stochastic gradient variance grows quadratically with the distance from the initialization. We consider this problem under both…
We study local complexity measures for stochastic convex optimization problems, providing a local minimax theory analogous to that of H\'{a}jek and Le Cam for classical statistical problems. We give complementary optimality results,…
Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been developed as a flexible family of scalable Bayesian sampling algorithms. However, there has been little theoretical analysis of the impact of minibatch size to the algorithm's…
Stochastic approximation is a framework unifying many random iterative algorithms occurring in a diverse range of applications. The stability of the process is often difficult to verify in practical applications and the process may even be…
We study the generalization properties of stochastic gradient methods for learning with convex loss functions and linearly parameterized functions. We show that, in the absence of penalizations or constraints, the stability and…
Empirical risk minimization is the main tool for prediction problems, but its extension to relational data remains unsolved. We solve this problem using recent ideas from graph sampling theory to (i) define an empirical risk for relational…
Leveraging algorithmic stability to derive sharp generalization bounds is a classic and powerful approach in learning theory. Since Vapnik and Chervonenkis [1974] first formalized the idea for analyzing SVMs, it has been utilized to study…
The tuning of stochastic gradient algorithms (SGAs) for optimization and sampling is often based on heuristics and trial-and-error rather than generalizable theory. We address this theory--practice gap by characterizing the large-sample…
A framework is introduced for sequentially solving convex stochastic minimization problems, where the objective functions change slowly, in the sense that the distance between successive minimizers is bounded. The minimization problems are…
The increasing scale of data propels the popularity of leveraging parallelism to speed up the optimization. Minibatch stochastic gradient descent (minibatch SGD) and local SGD are two popular methods for parallel optimization. The existing…
This study focuses on solving group zero-norm regularized robust loss minimization problems. We propose a proximal Majorization-Minimization (PMM) algorithm to address a class of equivalent Difference-of-Convex (DC) surrogate optimization…
We study the complexity of central controller synthesis problems for finite-state Markov decision processes, where the objective is to optimize both the expected mean-payoff performance of the system and its stability. We argue that the…