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Motivated by broad applications in machine learning, we study the popular accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) algorithm for solving (possibly nonconvex) optimization problems. We characterize the finite-time performance of this…
In this paper we study the adaptivity of submodular maximization. Adaptivity quantifies the number of sequential rounds that an algorithm makes when function evaluations can be executed in parallel. Adaptivity is a fundamental concept that…
We study statistical properties of the optimal value of the Sample Average Approximation. The focus is on the tail function of the absolute error induced by the Sample Average Approximation, deriving upper estimates of its outcomes…
Motivated by techniques developed in recent progress on lower bounds for sublinear time algorithms (Behnezhad, Roghani and Rubinstein, STOC 2023, FOCS 2023, and STOC 2024) we introduce and study a new class of randomized algorithmic…
In this paper we study the asymptotic behavior of a stochastic approximation scheme on two timescales with set-valued drift functions and in the presence of non-additive iterate-dependent Markov noise. It is shown that the recursion on each…
We begin by briefly surveying some results on the convergence of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) Method, proved in a companion paper by the present authors. These results are based on viewing SGD as a version of Stochastic…
In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a…
As saturated output observations are ubiquitous in practice, identifying stochastic systems with such nonlinear observations is a fundamental problem across various fields. This paper investigates the asymptotically efficient identification…
Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) are the predominant approaches to train deep learning models. The adaptive versions (e.g., Adam and AMSGrad) have been extensively used in practice, partly because they achieve faster convergence than the…
Stochastic variance reduced optimization methods are known to be globally convergent while they suffer from slow local convergence, especially when moderate or high accuracy is needed. To alleviate this problem, we propose an optimization…
Heavy-tailed stochastic gradient noise, commonly observed in transformer models, can destabilize the optimization process. Recent works mainly focus on developing and understanding approaches to address heavy-tailed noise in the centralized…
This paper addresses distributed parameter estimation in stochastic dynamic systems with quantized measurements, constrained by quantized communication and Markovian switching directed topologies. To enable accurate recovery of the original…
Stochastic versions of proximal methods have gained much attention in statistics and machine learning. These algorithms tend to admit simple, scalable forms, and enjoy numerical stability via implicit updates. In this work, we propose and…
Two-time-scale stochastic approximation, a generalized version of the popular stochastic approximation, has found broad applications in many areas including stochastic control, optimization, and machine learning. Despite its popularity,…
Time estimation is a fundamental task that underpins precision measurement, global navigation systems, financial markets, and the organisation of everyday life. Many biological processes also depend on time estimation by nanoscale clocks,…
The stochastic Auxiliary Problem Principle (APP) algorithm is a general Stochastic Approximation (SA) scheme that turns the resolution of an original optimization problem into the iterative resolution of a sequence of auxiliary problems.…
It is known that adaptive optimization algorithms represent the key pillar behind the rise of the Machine Learning field. In the Optimization literature numerous studies have been devoted to accelerated gradient methods but only recently…
We study stochastic approximation algorithms with Markovian noise and constant step-size $\alpha$. We develop a method based on infinitesimal generator comparisons to study the bias of the algorithm, which is the expected difference between…
In high sample-rate applications of the least-mean-square (LMS) adaptive filtering algorithm, pipelining or/and block processing is required. As opposed to earlier work, pipelining and block processing are jointly considered to obtain what…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are the most used algorithms in machine learning applications. In particular, SGD with adaptive learning rates and momentum is the industry standard to train deep networks. Despite the…