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We consider stochastic optimization of a smooth non-convex loss function with a convex non-smooth regularizer. In the online setting, where a single sample of the stochastic gradient of the loss is available at every iteration, the problem…
Matrix completion, where we wish to recover a low rank matrix by observing a few entries from it, is a widely studied problem in both theory and practice with wide applications. Most of the provable algorithms so far on this problem have…
We consider minimizing functions for which it is expensive to compute the (possibly stochastic) gradient. Such functions are prevalent in reinforcement learning, imitation learning and adversarial training. Our target optimization framework…
Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a classical algorithm that has had since the early days a huge impact on signal processing, and nowadays on machine learning, due to the necessity to deal with a large amount of data observed with…
In this paper, we propose a new technique named \textit{Stochastic Path-Integrated Differential EstimatoR} (SPIDER), which can be used to track many deterministic quantities of interest with significantly reduced computational cost. We…
Bisimulation metrics are powerful tools for measuring similarities between stochastic processes, and specifically Markov chains. Recent advances have uncovered that bisimulation metrics are, in fact, optimal-transport distances, which has…
This paper investigates the problem of tracking solutions of stochastic optimization problems with time-varying costs that depend on random variables with decision-dependent distributions. In this context, we propose the use of an online…
Existing studies on the degree correlation of evolving networks typically rely on differential equations and statistical analysis, resulting in only approximate solutions due to inherent randomness. To address this limitation, we propose an…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
In modern decentralized applications, ensuring communication efficiency and privacy for the users are the key challenges. In order to train machine-learning models, the algorithm has to communicate to the data center and sample data for its…
Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…
Black box discrete optimization (BBDO) appears in wide range of engineering tasks. Evolutionary or other BBDO approaches have been applied, aiming at automating necessary tuning of system parameters, such as hyper parameter tuning of…
Decentralized methods to solve finite-sum minimization problems are important in many signal processing and machine learning tasks where the data is distributed over a network of nodes and raw data sharing is not permitted due to privacy…
In this paper, we introduce an accelerated distributed stochastic gradient method with momentum for solving the distributed optimization problem, where a group of $n$ agents collaboratively minimize the average of the local objective…
We develop a predictive-first optimisation framework for streaming hidden Markov models. Unlike classical approaches that prioritise full posterior recovery under a fully specified generative model, we assume access to regime-specific…
We study the online estimation of the optimal policy of a Markov decision process (MDP). We propose a class of Stochastic Primal-Dual (SPD) methods which exploit the inherent minimax duality of Bellman equations. The SPD methods update a…
We study the unconstrained and the minimax saddle point variants of the convex multi-stage stochastic programming problem, where consecutive decisions are coupled through the objective functions, rather than through the constraints. We…
We show that stochastic acceleration can be achieved under the perturbed iterate framework (Mania et al., 2017) in asynchronous lock-free optimization, which leads to the optimal incremental gradient complexity for finite-sum objectives. We…
We reconsider the stochastic (sub)gradient approach to the unconstrained primal L1-SVM optimization. We observe that if the learning rate is inversely proportional to the number of steps, i.e., the number of times any training pattern is…
This paper proposes a set of novel optimization algorithms for solving a class of convex optimization problems with time-varying streaming cost function. We develop an approach to track the optimal solution with a bounded error. Unlike the…