Related papers: On the Stochastic (Variance-Reduced) Proximal Grad…
Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…
Stochastic gradient descent is an optimisation method that combines classical gradient descent with random subsampling within the target functional. In this work, we introduce the stochastic gradient process as a continuous-time…
Consider the stochastic composition optimization problem where the objective is a composition of two expected-value functions. We propose a new stochastic first-order method, namely the accelerated stochastic compositional proximal gradient…
Several important problem settings within the literature of reinforcement learning (RL), such as meta-learning, hierarchical learning, and RL from human feedback (RL-HF), can be modelled as bilevel RL problems. A lot has been achieved in…
Stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints have a broad range of applications in intelligent transportation, cyber-security, and smart grids. In this paper, first, we propose an inexact-proximal accelerated…
Stochastic gradient algorithms are the main focus of large-scale optimization problems and led to important successes in the recent advancement of the deep learning algorithms. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of…
In this paper, we introduce a new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithm, namely the randomized stochastic gradient (RSG) method, for solving an important class of nonlinear (possibly nonconvex) stochastic programming (SP) problems.…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…
This paper introduces PROMISE ($\textbf{Pr}$econditioned Stochastic $\textbf{O}$ptimization $\textbf{M}$ethods by $\textbf{I}$ncorporating $\textbf{S}$calable Curvature $\textbf{E}$stimates), a suite of sketching-based preconditioned…
The performance of standard stochastic approximation implementations can vary significantly based on the choice of the steplength sequence, and in general, little guidance is provided about good choices. Motivated by this gap, in the first…
In this work we introduce a novel approach, based on sampling, for finding assignments that are likely to be solutions to stochastic constraint satisfaction problems and constraint optimisation problems. Our approach reduces the size of the…
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…
It is a long-standing question to discover causal relations among a set of variables in many empirical sciences. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved promising results in causal discovery from observational data. However,…
The stochastic gradient Langevin Dynamics is one of the most fundamental algorithms to solve sampling problems and non-convex optimization appearing in several machine learning applications. Especially, its variance reduced versions have…
In high-dimensional statistics, variable selection recovers the latent sparse patterns from all possible covariate combinations. This paper proposes a novel optimization method to solve the exact L0-regularized regression problem, which is…
We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems. In particular, the objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a possibly…
We solve a regularized weighted low-rank approximation problem by a stochastic gradient descent on a manifold. To guarantee the convergence of our stochastic gradient descent, we establish a convergence theorem on manifolds for…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal…
This paper addresses the computational challenges in reliability-based topology optimization (RBTO) of structures associated with the estimation of statistics of the objective and constraints using standard sampling methods, and overcomes…