Related papers: Breaking the Heavy-Tailed Noise Barrier in Stochas…
Stochastic approximation is a foundation for many algorithms found in machine learning and optimization. It is in general slow to converge: the mean square error vanishes as $O(n^{-1})$. A deterministic counterpart known as quasi-stochastic…
The problem of stochastic convex optimization with bandit feedback (in the learning community) or without knowledge of gradients (in the optimization community) has received much attention in recent years, in the form of algorithms and…
We show that the \emph{stochastic gradient} bandit algorithm converges to a \emph{globally optimal} policy at an $O(1/t)$ rate, even with a \emph{constant} step size. Remarkably, global convergence of the stochastic gradient bandit…
Machine learning algorithms aim to find patterns from observations, which may include some noise, especially in robotics domain. To perform well even with such noise, we expect them to be able to detect outliers and discard them when…
We provide optimal lower bounds for two well-known parameter estimation (also known as statistical estimation) tasks in high dimensions with approximate differential privacy. First, we prove that for any $\alpha \le O(1)$, estimating the…
In this paper, we establish maximal concentration bounds for the iterates generated by a stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm under a contractive operator with respect to some arbitrary norm (for example, the $\ell_\infty$-norm). We…
This work examines the convergence of stochastic gradient-based optimization algorithms that use early stopping based on a validation function. The form of early stopping we consider is that optimization terminates when the norm of the…
The generalized smooth condition, $(L_{0},L_{1})$-smoothness, has triggered people's interest since it is more realistic in many optimization problems shown by both empirical and theoretical evidence. Two recent works established the…
Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…
Stochastic heavy ball momentum (SHB) is commonly used to train machine learning models, and often provides empirical improvements over stochastic gradient descent. By primarily focusing on strongly-convex quadratics, we aim to better…
We consider the optimization of a quadratic objective function whose gradients are only accessible through a stochastic oracle that returns the gradient at any given point plus a zero-mean finite variance random error. We present the first…
We consider the problem of clustering in the presence of noise. That is, when on top of cluster structure, the data also contains a subset of \emph{unstructured} points. Our goal is to detect the clusters despite the presence of many…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…
It has repeatedly been observed that loss minimization by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) leads to heavy-tailed distributions of neural network parameters. Here, we analyze a continuous diffusion approximation of SGD, called homogenized…
Motivated by emerging applications in machine learning, we consider an optimization problem in a general form where the gradient of the objective function is available through a biased stochastic oracle. We assume a bias-control parameter…
This paper considers stochastic optimization problems for a large class of objective functions, including convex and continuous submodular. Stochastic proximal gradient methods have been widely used to solve such problems; however, their…
In this paper, we first prove a high probability bound rather than an expectation bound for stochastic optimization with smooth loss. Furthermore, the existing analysis requires the knowledge of optimal classifier for tuning the step size…
In this paper, we study smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization problems, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions. We assume access to noisy evaluations of the functions and their gradients,…
A recent paper of Melbourne & Stuart, A note on diffusion limits of chaotic skew product flows, Nonlinearity 24 (2011) 1361-1367, gives a rigorous proof of convergence of a fast-slow deterministic system to a stochastic differential…
Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population respond to a deployed classifier by manipulating their features…