Related papers: Stochastic Approximation Beyond Gradient for Signa…

Stochastic and conditional simulation methods have been effective towards producing realistic realizations and simulations of spatial numerical models that share equal probability of occurrence. Application of these methods are valuable…

In this paper, we propose a StochAstic Recursive grAdient algoritHm (SARAH), as well as its practical variant SARAH+, as a novel approach to the finite-sum minimization problems. Different from the vanilla SGD and other modern stochastic…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…

Theory and application of stochastic approximation (SA) have become increasingly relevant due in part to applications in optimization and reinforcement learning. This paper takes a new look at SA with constant step-size $\alpha>0$, defined…

In this paper, we study the almost sure boundedness and the convergence of the stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm. At present, most available convergence proofs are based on the ODE method, and the almost sure boundedness of the…

Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…

We consider convex-concave saddle-point problems where the objective functions may be split in many components, and extend recent stochastic variance reduction methods (such as SVRG or SAGA) to provide the first large-scale linearly…

In machine learning, nonconvex optimization problems with multiple local optimums are often encountered. Graduated Optimization Algorithm (GOA) is a popular heuristic method to obtain global optimums of nonconvex problems through…

Variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods have gained popularity in recent times. Several variants exist with different strategies for the storing and sampling of gradients and this work concerns the interactions between these two…

This article presents a short and concise description of stochastic approximation algorithms in reinforcement learning of Markov decision processes. The algorithms can also be used as a suboptimal method for partially observed Markov…

Stochastic gradient methods are the workhorse (algorithms) of large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, signal processing, and other computational sciences and engineering. This paper studies Markov chain gradient descent, a…

We present the parallel and interacting stochastic approximation annealing (PISAA) algorithm, a stochastic simulation procedure for global optimisation, that extends and improves the stochastic approximation annealing (SAA) by using…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Stochastic versions of proximal methods have gained much attention in statistics and machine learning. These algorithms tend to admit simple, scalable forms, and enjoy numerical stability via implicit updates. In this work, we propose and…

Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to…

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…

This work develops new results for stochastic approximation algorithms. The emphases are on treating algorithms and limits with discontinuities. The main ingredients include the use of differential inclusions, set-valued analysis, and…

Gradient clipping is a commonly used technique to stabilize the training process of neural networks. A growing body of studies has shown that gradient clipping is a promising technique for dealing with the heavy-tailed behavior that emerged…

A regularized optimization problem over a large unstructured graph is studied, where the regularization term is tied to the graph geometry. Typical regularization examples include the total variation and the Laplacian regularizations over…

SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent…