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We study stochastic second-order methods for solving general non-convex optimization problems. We propose using a special version of momentum to stabilize the stochastic gradient and Hessian estimates in Newton's method. We show that…
We propose a novel study of the stochastic proximal gradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth. Under suitable assumptions and without requiring any boundedness or control of the variance of the…
In this paper, we study the stability problem of a stochastic, nonlinear, discrete-time system. We introduce a linear transfer operator-based Lyapunov measure as a new tool for stability verification of stochastic systems. Weaker…
Many large-scale and distributed optimization problems can be brought into a composite form in which the objective function is given by the sum of a smooth term and a nonsmooth regularizer. Such problems can be solved via a proximal…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…
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,…
Subgradient methods are the natural extension to the non-smooth case of the classical gradient descent for regular convex optimization problems. However, in general, they are characterized by slow convergence rates, and they require…
We consider the minimization of non-convex functions that typically arise in machine learning. Specifically, we focus our attention on a variant of trust region methods known as cubic regularization. This approach is particularly attractive…
For stochastic systems with nonvanishing noise, i.e., at the desired state the noise port does not vanish, it is impossible to achieve the global stability of the desired state in the sense of probability. This bad property also leads to…
We present a family of algorithms, called descent algorithms, for optimizing convex and non-convex functions. We also introduce a new first-order algorithm, called rescaled gradient descent (RGD), and show that RGD achieves a faster…
Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…
This paper presents a new method for synthesizing stochastic control Lyapunov functions for a class of nonlinear stochastic control systems. The technique relies on a transformation of the classical nonlinear Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman partial…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…
Our work is part of the close link between continuous-time dissipative dynamical systems and optimization algorithms, and more precisely here, in the stochastic setting. We aim to study stochastic convex minimization problems through the…
We consider the problem of minimizing the average of a large number of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In the context of most machine learning applications, each loss function is non-negative and thus can be expressed as the…
This paper aims at developing two versions of the generalized Newton method to compute not merely arbitrary local minimizers of nonsmooth optimization problems but just those, which possess an important stability property known as tilt…
Stochastic momentum methods have been widely adopted in training deep neural networks. However, their theoretical analysis of convergence of the training objective and the generalization error for prediction is still under-explored. This…
This paper is concerned with stability analysis of nonlinear time-varying systems by using Lyapunov function based approach. The classical Lyapunov stability theorems are generalized in the sense that the time-derivative of the Lyapunov…
Incremental stability is a property of dynamical and control systems, requiring the uniform asymptotic stability of every trajectory, rather than that of an equilibrium point or a particular time-varying trajectory. Similarly to stability,…
This paper presents new sufficient conditions for convergence and asymptotic or exponential stability of a stochastic discrete-time system, under which the constructed Lyapunov function always decreases in expectation along the system's…