Related papers: Stochastic Approximation Beyond Gradient for Signa…
Although with progress in introducing auxiliary amortized inference models, learning discrete latent variable models is still challenging. In this paper, we show that the annoying difficulty of obtaining reliable stochastic gradients for…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a classical approach for stochastic convex optimization. Previous studies have demonstrated that the convergence rate of SA can be improved by introducing either smoothness or strong convexity condition. In…
Many statistical problems involve mixture models and the need for computationally efficient methods to estimate the mixing distribution has increased dramatically in recent years. Newton [Sankhya Ser. A 64 (2002) 306--322] proposed a fast…
Stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms have been widely applied in minimization problems when the loss functions and/or the gradient information are only accessible through noisy evaluations. Stochastic gradient (SG) descent---a…
Two-timescale Stochastic Approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Their iterates have two parts that are updated using distinct stepsizes. In this work, we develop a novel recipe for their finite sample…
Stochastic variance reduced methods have shown strong performance in solving finite-sum problems. However, these methods usually require the users to manually tune the step-size, which is time-consuming or even infeasible for some…
Anderson mixing (AM) is an acceleration method for fixed-point iterations. Despite its success and wide usage in scientific computing, the convergence theory of AM remains unclear, and its applications to machine learning problems are not…
In this work, we introduce a learning model designed to meet the needs of applications in which computational resources are limited, and robustness and interpretability are prioritized. Learning problems can be formulated as constrained…
This paper proposes a constrained stochastic successive convex approximation (CSSCA) algorithm to find a stationary point for a general non-convex stochastic optimization problem, whose objective and constraint functions are non-convex and…
In this work, we investigate stochastic approximation (SA) with Markovian data and nonlinear updates under constant stepsize $\alpha>0$. Existing work has primarily focused on either i.i.d. data or linear update rules. We take a new…
In online learning from non-stationary data streams, it is necessary to learn robustly to outliers and to adapt quickly to changes in the underlying data generating mechanism. In this paper, we refer to the former attribute of online…
Sample average approximation (SAA) is a tractable approach for dealing with chance constrained programming, a challenging stochastic optimization problem. The constraint of SAA is characterized by the $0/1$ loss function which results in…
Non-convex optimization plays a key role in a growing number of machine learning applications. This motivates the identification of specialized structure that enables sharper theoretical analysis. One such identified structure is…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a method for finding the root of an operator perturbed by noise. There is a rich literature establishing the asymptotic normality of rescaled SA iterates under fairly mild conditions. However, these…
Large-scale optimization problems require algorithms both effective and efficient. One such popular and proven algorithm is Stochastic Gradient Descent which uses first-order gradient information to solve these problems. This paper studies…
This paper studies the control-oriented identification problem of set-valued moving average systems with uniform persistent excitations and observation noises. A stochastic approximation-based (SA-based) algorithm without projections or…
The classical Method of Successive Approximations (MSA) is an iterative method for solving stochastic control problems and is derived from Pontryagin's optimality principle. It is known that the MSA may fail to converge. Using careful…
This paper presents a stochastic approximation proximal subgradient (SAPS) method for stochastic convex-concave minimax optimization. By accessing unbiased and variance bounded approximate subgradients, we show that this algorithm exhibits…
This paper studies fixed step-size stochastic approximation (SA) schemes, including stochastic gradient schemes, in a Riemannian framework. It is motivated by several applications, where geodesics can be computed explicitly, and their use…
Many machine learning and optimization algorithms are built upon the framework of stochastic approximation (SA), for which the selection of step-size (or learning rate) $\{\alpha_n\}$ is crucial for success. An essential condition for…