Related papers: Stochastic Approximation Beyond Gradient for Signa…
Stochastic approximation algorithms are iterative procedures which are used to approximate a target value in an environment where the target is unknown and direct observations are corrupted by noise. These algorithms are useful, for…
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…
This paper studies the performative prediction problem which optimizes a stochastic loss function with data distribution that depends on the decision variable. We consider a setting where the agent(s) provides samples adapted to the…
We revisit the sample average approximation (SAA) approach for non-convex stochastic programming. We show that applying the SAA approach to problems with expected value equality constraints does not necessarily result in asymptotic…
In stochastic optimization, a common tool to deal sequentially with large sample is to consider the well-known stochastic gradient algorithm. Nevertheless, since the stepsequence is the same for each direction, this can lead to bad results…
This paper presents a finite time convergence analysis for a decentralized stochastic approximation (SA) scheme. The scheme generalizes several algorithms for decentralized machine learning and multi-agent reinforcement learning. Our proof…
We present adaptive sequential SAA (sample average approximation) algorithms to solve large-scale two-stage stochastic linear programs. The iterative algorithm framework we propose is organized into \emph{outer} and \emph{inner} iterations…
Despite the development of numerous adaptive optimizers, tuning the learning rate of stochastic gradient methods remains a major roadblock to obtaining good practical performance in machine learning. Rather than changing the learning rate…
Stochastic variance-reduced algorithms such as Stochastic Average Gradient (SAG) and SAGA, and their deterministic counterparts like the Incremental Aggregated Gradient (IAG) method, have been extensively studied in large-scale machine…
Stochastic approximation is a powerful class of algorithms with celebrated success. However, a large body of previous analysis focuses on stochastic approximations driven by contractive operators, which is not applicable in some important…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
Stochastic approximation is one of the effective approach to deal with the large-scale machine learning problems and the recent research has focused on reduction of variance, caused by the noisy approximations of the gradients. In this…
The standard theory of stochastic approximation (SA) is extended to the case when the constraint set is a Riemannian manifold. Specifically, the standard ODE method for analyzing SA schemes is extended to iterations constrained to stay on a…
Despite the recent growth of theoretical studies and empirical successes of neural networks, gradient backpropagation is still the most widely used algorithm for training such networks. On the one hand, we have deterministic or full…
We present a uniform analysis of biased stochastic gradient methods for minimizing convex, strongly convex, and non-convex composite objectives, and identify settings where bias is useful in stochastic gradient estimation. The framework we…
The Stochastic Approximation EM (SAEM) algorithm, a variant stochastic approximation of EM, is a versatile tool for inference in incomplete data models. In this paper, we review the fundamental EM algorithm and then focus especially on the…
Motivated by the pressing challenges in the digital twin development for biomanufacturing systems, we introduce an adjoint sensitivity analysis (SA) approach to expedite the learning of mechanistic model parameters. In this paper, we…
In the machine learning and optimization community, there are two main approaches for the convex risk minimization problem, namely, the Stochastic Approximation (SA) and the Sample Average Approximation (SAA). In terms of oracle complexity…
Sample average approximation (SAA) is a widely popular approach to data-driven decision-making under uncertainty. Under mild assumptions, SAA is both tractable and enjoys strong asymptotic performance guarantees. Similar guarantees,…
SARSA is an on-policy algorithm to learn a Markov decision process policy in reinforcement learning. We investigate the SARSA algorithm with linear function approximation under the non-i.i.d.\ data, where a single sample trajectory is…