Related papers: Revisiting Step-Size Assumptions in Stochastic App…
Linear two-timescale stochastic approximation (SA) scheme is an important class of algorithms which has become popular in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for the policy evaluation problem. Recently, a number of works have been…
We consider minimizing an objective function subject to constraints defined by the intersection of lower-level sets of convex functions. We study two cases: (i) strongly convex and Lipschitz-smooth objective function and (ii) convex but…
This paper studies the control-oriented identification problem of set-valued moving average systems with uniform persistent excitations and observation noises. A stochastic approximation-based (SA-based) algorithm without projections or…
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…
In this paper, we study the effectiveness of using a constant stepsize in statistical inference via linear stochastic approximation (LSA) algorithms with Markovian data. After establishing a Central Limit Theorem (CLT), we outline an…
We study a statistical method to estimate the optimal value, and the optimality gap of a given solution for stochastic optimization as an assessment of the solution quality. Our approach is based on bootstrap aggregating, or bagging,…
Machine learning practitioners invest significant manual and computational resources in finding suitable learning rates for optimization algorithms. We provide a probabilistic motivation, in terms of Gaussian inference, for popular…
We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…
We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…
Polyak-Ruppert averaging is a widely used technique to achieve the optimal asymptotic variance of stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms, yet its high-probability performance guarantees remain underexplored in general settings. In this…
This dissertation shows that careful injection of noise into sample data can substantially speed up Expectation-Maximization algorithms. Expectation-Maximization algorithms are a class of iterative algorithms for extracting maximum…
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.…
Recently, several studies consider the stochastic optimization problem but in a heavy-tailed noise regime, i.e., the difference between the stochastic gradient and the true gradient is assumed to have a finite $p$-th moment (say being upper…
Machine learning algorithms in high-dimensional settings are highly susceptible to the influence of even a small fraction of structured outliers, making robust optimization techniques essential. In particular, within the…
The tuning of stochastic gradient algorithms (SGAs) for optimization and sampling is often based on heuristics and trial-and-error rather than generalizable theory. We address this theory--practice gap by characterizing the large-sample…
Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large scale optimization of machine learning objective functions. Yet, its performance is greatly variable and heavily depends on the choice of the stepsizes. This has motivated a…
For obtaining optimal first-order convergence guarantee for stochastic optimization, it is necessary to use a recurrent data sampling algorithm that samples every data point with sufficient frequency. Most commonly used data sampling…
In this paper, we study the convergence properties of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method for finding a stationary point of a given objective function $J(\cdot)$. The objective function is not required to be convex. Rather, our…
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…
We revisit the sample average approximation (SAA) approach for non-convex stochastic programming. We show that applying the SAA approach to problems with expected value equality constraints does not necessarily result in asymptotic…