Related papers: A Gradually Reinforced Sample-Average-Approximatio…
When there are infinitely many scenarios, the current studies of two-stage stochastic programming problems rely on the relatively complete recourse assumption. However, such assumption can be unrealistic for many real-world problems. This…
Sample average approximation (SAA) is a tractable approach for dealing with chance constrained programming, a challenging stochastic optimization problem. The constraint of SAA is characterized by the $0/1$ loss function which results in…
We present a novel approach for black-box VI that bypasses the difficulties of stochastic gradient ascent, including the task of selecting step-sizes. Our approach involves using a sequence of sample average approximation (SAA) problems.…
The classical Method of Successive Approximations (MSA) is an iterative method for solving stochastic control problems and is derived from Pontryagin's optimality principle. It is known that the MSA may fail to converge. Using careful…
We investigate the feasibility of sample average approximation (SAA) for general stochastic optimization problems, including two-stage stochastic programming without the relatively complete recourse assumption. Instead of analyzing problems…
We consider stochastic optimization problems which use observed data to estimate essential characteristics of the random quantities involved. Sample average approximation (SAA) or empirical (plug-in) estimation are very popular ways to use…
The sample average approximation (SAA) and the stochastic approximation (SA) are two popular schemes for solving the stochastic variational inequalities problem (SVIP). In the past decades, theories on the consistency of the SAA solutions…
Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a popular approach for solving fixed-point equations where the information is corrupted by noise. In this paper, we consider an SA involving a contraction mapping with respect to an arbitrary norm, and show…
Automatic data augmentation (AutoDA) plays an important role in enhancing the generalization of neural networks. However, mainstream AutoDA methods often encounter two challenges: either the search process is excessively time-consuming,…
Motivated by problems arising in decentralized control problems and non-cooperative Nash games, we consider a class of strongly monotone Cartesian variational inequality (VI) problems, where the mappings either contain expectations or their…
The challenge of Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization poses a foundational concern for the application of machine learning algorithms to risk-sensitive areas. Inspired by traditional importance weighting and propensity weighting…
We present the parallel and interacting stochastic approximation annealing (PISAA) algorithm, a stochastic simulation procedure for global optimisation, that extends and improves the stochastic approximation annealing (SAA) by using…
We propose a flexible scenario-based regularized Sample Average Approximation (SBR-SAA) framework for stochastic optimization. This work is motivated by challenges in standard Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization (WDRO), where…
This work is motivated by the challenges of applying the sample average approximation (SAA) method to multistage stochastic programming with an unknown continuous-state Markov process. While SAA is widely used in static and two-stage…
We establish central limit theorems for the Sample Average Approximation (SAA) method in discrete-time, finite-horizon stochastic optimal control. Our analysis is based on an abstract limit theorem for stochastic backward recursions, which…
In the machine learning and optimization community, there are two main approaches for the convex risk minimization problem, namely, the Stochastic Approximation (SA) and the Sample Average Approximation (SAA). In terms of oracle complexity…
Many real-world optimization problems are not naturally homogeneous vectors but composite design objects with heterogeneous parameters: integers, real values, Booleans, categoricals, complex-valued descriptors, and embedding vectors.…
Stochastic gradient descent is a canonical tool for addressing stochastic optimization problems, and forms the bedrock of modern machine learning and statistics. In this work, we seek to balance the fact that attenuating step-size is…
The sample average approximation (SAA) approach is applied to risk-neutral optimization problems governed by semilinear elliptic partial differential equations with random inputs. After constructing a compact set that contains the SAA…
The standard theory of stochastic approximation (SA) is extended to the case when the constraint set is a Riemannian manifold. Specifically, the standard ODE method for analyzing SA schemes is extended to iterations constrained to stay on a…