Related papers: Revisiting Step-Size Assumptions in Stochastic App…
We consider the least-squares regression problem and provide a detailed asymptotic analysis of the performance of averaged constant-step-size stochastic gradient descent (a.k.a. least-mean-squares). In the strongly-convex case, we provide…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
We consider the fundamental problem of estimating the mean of a vector $y=X\beta+z$, where $X$ is an $n\times p$ design matrix in which one can have far more variables than observations, and $z$ is a stochastic error term--the so-called…
The convergence rate is analyzed for the SpaSRA algorithm (Sparse Reconstruction by Separable Approximation) for minimizing a sum $f (\m{x}) + \psi (\m{x})$ where $f$ is smooth and $\psi$ is convex, but possibly nonsmooth. It is shown that…
Regularized empirical risk minimization (rERM) has become important in data-intensive fields such as genomics and advertising, with stochastic gradient methods typically used to solve the largest problems. However, ill-conditioned…
In this paper we revisit a fundamental technical issue within the theory of stochastic approximation (SA) in a Markovian framework, first proposed in the book by Djereveckii and Fradkov (1981), and further developed in much detail in the…
This paper establishes the first almost sure convergence rate and the first maximal concentration bound with exponential tails for general contractive stochastic approximation algorithms with Markovian noise. As a corollary, we also obtain…
Motivated by engineering applications such as resource allocation in networks and inventory systems, we consider average-reward Reinforcement Learning with unbounded state space and reward function. Recent works studied this problem in the…
Debiased machine learning is a meta algorithm based on bias correction and sample splitting to calculate confidence intervals for functionals, i.e. scalar summaries, of machine learning algorithms. For example, an analyst may desire the…
We present a probabilistic model for stochastic iterative algorithms with the use case of optimization algorithms in mind. Based on this model, we present PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for functions that are defined on the trajectory…
In the context of statistical supervised learning, the noiseless linear model assumes that there exists a deterministic linear relation $Y = \langle \theta_*, X \rangle$ between the random output $Y$ and the random feature vector $\Phi(U)$,…
Several classical adaptive optimization algorithms, such as line search and trust region methods, have been recently extended to stochastic settings where function values, gradients, and Hessians in some cases, are estimated via stochastic…
In this paper, we present a unified algorithm for stochastic optimization that makes use of a "momentum" term; in other words, the stochastic gradient depends not only on the current true gradient of the objective function, but also on the…
Classical probabilistic rounding error analysis is particularly well suited to stochastic rounding (SR), and it yields strong results when dealing with floating-point algorithms that rely heavily on summation. For many numerical linear…
Large sectors of the recent optimization literature focused in the last decade on the development of optimal stochastic first order schemes for constrained convex models under progressively relaxed assumptions. Stochastic proximal point is…
The spectral risk has wide applications in machine learning, especially in real-world decision-making, where people are not only concerned with models' average performance. By assigning different weights to the losses of different sample…
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…
This paper studies linear stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms and their application to multi-agent systems in engineering and sociology. As main contribution, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence of linear SA…
We propose dynamic sampled stochastic approximation (SA) methods for stochastic optimization with a heavy-tailed distribution (with finite 2nd moment). The objective is the sum of a smooth convex function with a convex regularizer.…
In this paper, we establish non-asymptotic bounds for accuracy of normal approximation for linear two-timescale stochastic approximation (TTSA) algorithms driven by martingale difference or Markov noise. Focusing on both the last iterate…