Related papers: Stochastic Approximation with Delayed Updates: Fin…
The theory of stochastic approximations form the theoretical foundation for studying convergence properties of many popular recursive learning algorithms in statistics, machine learning and statistical physics. Large deviations for…
We analyze (stochastic) gradient descent (SGD) with delayed updates on smooth quasi-convex and non-convex functions and derive concise, non-asymptotic, convergence rates. We show that the rate of convergence in all cases consists of two…
Many distributed machine learning (ML) systems adopt the non-synchronous execution in order to alleviate the network communication bottleneck, resulting in stale parameters that do not reflect the latest updates. Despite much development in…
The expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is a widespread method for empirical Bayesian inference, but its expectation step (E-step) is often intractable. Employing a stochastic approximation scheme with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…
We analyze convergence of decentralized cooperative online estimation algorithms by a network of multiple nodes via information exchanging in an uncertain environment. Each node has a linear observation of an unknown parameter with randomly…
Two-time-scale stochastic approximation (SA) is an algorithm with coupled iterations which has found broad applications in reinforcement learning, optimization and game control. In this work, we derive mean squared error bounds for…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a fundamental algorithm for estimating value functions in reinforcement learning. Recent finite-time analyses of TD with linear function approximation quantify its theoretical convergence rate. However,…
We study a stochastic optimization problem in which the sampling distribution depends on the decision variable, and the available samples are generated through an iterate-dependent Markov chain. Such settings arise naturally in problems…
In this paper, we study asynchronous stochastic approximation algorithms without communication delays. Our main contribution is a stability proof for these algorithms that extends a method of Borkar and Meyn by accommodating more general…
This paper proposes the first-ever algorithmic framework for tuning hyper-parameters of stochastic optimization algorithm based on reinforcement learning. Hyper-parameters impose significant influences on the performance of stochastic…
Delays and stochasticity have both served as crucially valuable ingredients in mathematical descriptions of control, physical, and biological systems. In this work, we investigate how explicitly dynamical stochasticity in delays modulates…
The primary goal of this paper is to provide an efficient solution algorithm based on the augmented Lagrangian framework for optimization problems with a stochastic objective function and deterministic constraints. Our main contribution is…
Stochastic approximation is a class of algorithms that update a vector iteratively, incrementally, and stochastically, including, e.g., stochastic gradient descent and temporal difference learning. One fundamental challenge in analyzing a…
Numerous Optimization Algorithms have a time-varying update rule thanks to, for instance, a changing step size, momentum parameter or, Hessian approximation. In this paper, we apply unrolled or automatic differentiation to a time-varying…
This paper presents extensions of finite-time stability results to some prototypical adaptive control and estimation frameworks. First, we present a novel scheme of online parameter estimation that guarantees convergence of the estimation…
We consider the setting where a master wants to run a distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm on $n$ workers, each having a subset of the data. Distributed SGD may suffer from the effect of stragglers, i.e., slow or…
This paper develops an unified framework to study finite-sample convergence guarantees of a large class of value-based asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. We do this by first reformulating the RL algorithms as…
We study the performance of a stochastic algorithm based on the power method that adaptively learns the large deviation functions characterizing the fluctuations of additive functionals of Markov processes, used in physics to model…
Stochastic approximation (SA) that involves multiple coupled sequences, known as multiple-sequence SA (MSSA), finds diverse applications in the fields of signal processing and machine learning. However, existing theoretical understandings…
In this work, multiplicative stochasticity is applied to the learning rate of stochastic optimization algorithms, giving rise to stochastic learning-rate schemes. In-expectation theoretical convergence results of Stochastic Gradient Descent…