Related papers: A Model-Based Method for Minimizing CVaR and Beyon…

We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…

Value-at-risk (VaR) has been playing the role of a standard risk measure since its introduction. In practice, the delta-normal approach is usually adopted to approximate the VaR of portfolios with option positions. Its effectiveness,…

This paper studies consensus-based decentralized stochastic optimization for minimizing possibly non-convex expected objectives with convex non-smooth regularizers and nonlinear functional inequality constraints. We reformulate the…

The spectral risk has wide applications in machine learning, especially in real-world decision-making, where people are not only concerned with models' average performance. By assigning different weights to the losses of different sample…

We consider constrained optimization problems with a nonsmooth objective function in the form of mathematical expectation. The Sample Average Approximation (SAA) is used to estimate the objective function and variable sample size strategy…

We propose a multilevel stochastic approximation (MLSA) scheme for the computation of the value-at-risk (VaR) and expected shortfall (ES) of a financial loss, which can only be computed via simulations conditionally on the realisation of…

We propose a sigmoidal approximation for the value-at-risk (that we call SigVaR) and we use this approximation to tackle nonlinear programs (NLPs) with chance constraints. We prove that the approximation is conservative and that the level…

Existing polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) image classification methods cannot achieve satisfactory performance on complex scenes characterized by several types of land cover with significant levels of noise or similar…

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies that balance the expected reward and risk. In this paper, we present a novel risk-sensitive RL framework that employs an Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)…

Considering non-stationary environments in online optimization enables decision-maker to effectively adapt to changes and improve its performance over time. In such cases, it is favorable to adopt a strategy that minimizes the negative…

Conditional Value-at-Risk ($\mathrm{CV@R}$) is one of the most popular measures of risk, which has been recently considered as a performance criterion in supervised statistical learning, as it is related to desirable operational features in…

In this paper, we proposed a new technique, {\em variance controlled stochastic gradient} (VCSG), to improve the performance of the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithm. To avoid over-reducing the variance of gradient by…

In this paper, we study the stochastic linear complementarity problems on extended second order cones (stochastic ESOCLCP). We first convert the problem to a stochastic mixed complementarity problem on the nonegative orthant (SMixCP).…

Robust estimators for linear regression require non-convex objective functions to shield against adverse affects of outliers. This non-convexity brings challenges, particularly when combined with penalization in high-dimensional settings.…

Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) is an optimization method originally designed for tackling machine learning problems with a finite sum structure. SVRG was later shown to work for policy evaluation, a problem in reinforcement…

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…

We study a linear-quadratic, optimal control problem on a discrete, finite time horizon with distributional ambiguity, in which the cost is assessed via Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). We take steps toward deriving a scalable dynamic…

We consider a class of chance-constrained programs in which profit needs to be maximized while enforcing that a given adverse event remains rare. Using techniques from large deviations and extreme value theory, we show how the optimal value…

CVaR (Conditional Value at Risk) is a risk metric widely used in finance. However, dynamically optimizing CVaR is difficult since it is not a standard Markov decision process (MDP) and the principle of dynamic programming fails. In this…