Related papers: A Gradually Reinforced Sample-Average-Approximatio…
The modified Method of Successive Approximations (MSA) is an iterative scheme for approximating solutions to stochastic control problems in continuous time based on Pontryagin Optimality Principle which, starting with an initial open loop…
This paper analyzes the convergence for a large class of Riemannian stochastic approximation (SA) schemes, which aim at tackling stochastic optimization problems. In particular, the recursions we study use either the exponential map of the…
We propose a statistical adaptive procedure called SALSA for automatically scheduling the learning rate (step size) in stochastic gradient methods. SALSA first uses a smoothed stochastic line-search procedure to gradually increase the…
Deep metric learning aims to learn an embedding space, where semantically similar samples are close together and dissimilar ones are repelled against. To explore more hard and informative training signals for augmentation and…
The Stochastic Series Expansion (SSE) technique is a quantum Monte Carlo method that is especially efficient for many quantum spin systems and boson models. It was the first generic method free from the discretization errors affecting…
We derive new and improved non-asymptotic deviation inequalities for the sample average approximation (SAA) of an optimization problem. Our results give strong error probability bounds that are "sub-Gaussian"~even when the randomness of the…
In this paper, an analytic approximation method for highly nonlinear equations, namely the homotopy analysis method (HAM), is employed to solve some backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) and forward-backward stochastic…
Sample average approximation (SAA) replaces an intractable expected objective by an empirical average and is a basic device of modern stochastic optimization. We develop a rate theory for optimal values and empirical…
The approximation of a high-dimensional vector by a small combination of column vectors selected from a fixed matrix has been actively debated in several different disciplines. In this paper, a sampling approach based on the Monte Carlo…
We develop in this work a numerical method for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with weak second order accuracy based on Gaussian mixture. Unlike the conventional higher order schemes for SDEs based on It\^o-Taylor expansion and…
Generating large-scale samples of stationary random fields is of great importance in the fields such as geomaterial modeling and uncertainty quantification. Traditional methodologies based on covariance matrix decomposition have the…
This paper concerns quasi-stochastic approximation (QSA) to solve root finding problems commonly found in applications to optimization and reinforcement learning. The general constant gain algorithm may be expressed as the…
We consider convex optimization problems with a possibly nonsmooth objective function in the form of a mathematical expectation. The proposed framework (AN-SPS) employs Sample Average Approximations (SAA) to approximate the objective…
We develop two novel stochastic variance-reduction methods to approximate solutions of a class of nonmonotone [generalized] equations. Our algorithms leverage a new combination of ideas from the forward-reflected-backward splitting method…
We present Zeroth-order Riemannian Averaging Stochastic Approximation (\texttt{Zo-RASA}) algorithms for stochastic optimization on Riemannian manifolds. We show that \texttt{Zo-RASA} achieves optimal sample complexities for generating…
We study constrained nested stochastic optimization problems in which the objective function is a composition of two smooth functions whose exact values and derivatives are not available. We propose a single time-scale stochastic…
We present a family of \textit{Gaussian Mixture Approximation} (GMA) samplers for sampling unnormalised target densities, encompassing \textit{weights-only GMA} (W-GMA), \textit{Laplace Mixture Approximation} (LMA),…
This paper presents the first sufficient conditions that guarantee the stability and almost sure convergence of multi-timescale stochastic approximation (SA) iterates. It extends the existing results on one-timescale and two-timescale SA…
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…
Sampling from a multimodal distribution is a fundamental and challenging problem in computational science and statistics. Among various approaches proposed for this task, one popular method is Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS). In this…