Related papers: Optimization of utility-based shortfall risk: A no…
A large class of stochastic programs involve optimizing an expectation taken with respect to an underlying distribution that is unknown in practice. One popular approach to addressing the distributional uncertainty, known as the…
Recently Shah et al., 2020 pointed out the pitfalls of the simplicity bias - the tendency of gradient-based algorithms to learn simple models - which include the model's high sensitivity to small input perturbations, as well as sub-optimal…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in statistical and machine learning due to its computational and memory efficiency. Various averaging schemes have been proposed to accelerate the convergence of SGD in…
Biased stochastic estimators, such as finite-differences for noisy gradient estimation, often contain parameters that need to be properly chosen to balance impacts from the bias and the variance. While the optimal order of these parameters…
We introduce a hybrid stochastic estimator to design stochastic gradient algorithms for solving stochastic optimization problems. Such a hybrid estimator is a convex combination of two existing biased and unbiased estimators and leads to…
Stochastic iterative algorithms, including stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD), are widely utilized for optimization and sampling in large-scale and high-dimensional problems in machine…
We discuss a general approach to building non-asymptotic confidence bounds for stochastic optimization problems. Our principal contribution is the observation that a Sample Average Approximation of a problem supplies upper and lower bounds…
We show that unconverged stochastic gradient descent can be interpreted as a procedure that samples from a nonparametric variational approximate posterior distribution. This distribution is implicitly defined as the transformation of an…
We revisit a classical assumption for analyzing stochastic gradient algorithms where the squared norm of the stochastic subgradient (or the variance for smooth problems) is allowed to grow as fast as the squared norm of the optimization…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a key method used in statistical learning. Recently, its non-asymptotic convergence analysis has been considered in many papers. However, most of the prior analyses are made under restrictive assumptions…
Robust optimization provides a principled framework for decision-making under uncertainty, with broad applications in finance, engineering, and operations research. In portfolio optimization, uncertainty in expected returns and covariances…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with adaptive steps is widely used to train deep neural networks and generative models. Most theoretical results assume that it is possible to obtain unbiased gradient estimators, which is not the case in…
This paper considers mean square error (MSE) analysis for stochastic gradient sampling algorithms applied to underdamped Langevin dynamics under a global convexity assumption. A novel discrete Poisson equation framework is developed to…
In this paper we estimate the mean-variance portfolio in the high-dimensional case using the recent results from the theory of random matrices. We construct a linear shrinkage estimator which is distribution-free and is optimal in the sense…
We derive new and improved non-asymptotic deviation inequalities for the sample average approximation (SAA) of an optimization problem. Our results give strong error probability bounds that are "sub-Gaussian"~even when the randomness of the…
In this paper, we present a novel derivative-free optimization framework for solving unconstrained stochastic optimization problems. Many problems in fields ranging from simulation optimization to reinforcement learning involve settings…
Spectral risk objectives - also called $L$-risks - allow for learning systems to interpolate between optimizing average-case performance (as in empirical risk minimization) and worst-case performance on a task. We develop stochastic…
In this paper, we present a stochastic gradient algorithm for minimizing a smooth objective function that is an expectation over noisy cost samples, and only the latter are observed for any given parameter. Our algorithm employs a gradient…
We develop a framework for convexifying a fairly general class of optimization problems. Under additional assumptions, we analyze the suboptimality of the solution to the convexified problem relative to the original nonconvex problem and…
A number of optimization approaches have been proposed for optimizing nonconvex objectives (e.g. deep learning models), such as batch gradient descent, stochastic gradient descent and stochastic variance reduced gradient descent. Theory…