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We study the problem of parameter estimation for a univariate discretely observed ergodic diffusion process given as a solution to a stochastic differential equation. The estimation procedure we propose consists of two steps. In the first…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-04-17 Shota Gugushvili , Peter Spreij

Randomized smoothing is a widely adopted technique for optimizing nonsmooth objective functions. However, its efficiency analysis typically relies on global Lipschitz continuity, a condition rarely met in practical applications. To address…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-10 Jingfan Xia , Zhenwei Lin , Qi Deng

Various optimal gradient-based algorithms have been developed for smooth nonconvex optimization. However, many nonconvex machine learning problems do not belong to the class of smooth functions and therefore the existing algorithms are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-27 Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang , Zhaosong Lu

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of three convex functions: i) a smooth function $f$ in the form of an expectation or a finite average, ii) a non-smooth function $g$ in the form of a finite average of proximable functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-25 Konstantin Mishchenko , Peter Richtárik

This paper is devoted to the study of stochastic optimization problems under the generalized smoothness assumption. By considering the unbiased gradient oracle in Stochastic Gradient Descent, we provide strategies to achieve in bounds the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-26 Aleksandr Lobanov , Alexander Gasnikov

Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Yunwen Lei

We wish to compute the gradient of an expectation over a finite or countably infinite sample space having $K \leq \infty$ categories. When $K$ is indeed infinite, or finite but very large, the relevant summation is intractable. Accordingly,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-14 Runjing Liu , Jeffrey Regier , Nilesh Tripuraneni , Michael I. Jordan , Jon McAuliffe

Learning models with discrete latent variables using stochastic gradient descent remains a challenge due to the high variance of gradient estimates. Modern variance reduction techniques mostly consider categorical distributions and have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Artyom Gadetsky , Kirill Struminsky , Christopher Robinson , Novi Quadrianto , Dmitry Vetrov

This paper considers approximate smoothing for discretely observed non-linear stochastic differential equations. The problem is tackled by developing methods for linearising stochastic differential equations with respect to an arbitrary…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-01-21 Filip Tronarp , Simo Särkkä

We propose an online parametric estimation method of stochastic differential equations with discrete observations and misspecified modelling based on online gradient descent. Our study provides uniform upper bounds for the risks of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-18 Shogo Nakakita

Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Harsh Vardhan , Sebastian U. Stich

Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying

Stochastic kinetic models are ubiquitous in physics, yet inferring their parameters from experimental data remains challenging. In deterministic models, parameter inference often relies on gradients, as they can be obtained efficiently…

Computational Physics · Physics 2026-04-03 Ludwig Burger , Annalena Kofler , Lukas Heinrich , Ulrich Gerland

This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-27 Michael R. Metel , Akiko Takeda

An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Albert S. Berahas , Frank E. Curtis , Lara Zebiane

Stochastic optimization problems with unknown decision-dependent distributions have attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its importance in applications. Since the gradient of the objective function is inaccessible as a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda

Gradients play a pivotal role in neural networks explanation. The inherent high dimensionality and structural complexity of neural networks result in the original gradients containing a significant amount of noise. While several approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Linjiang Zhou , Xiaochuan Shi , Chao Ma , Zepeng Wang

Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 João Carvalho , Davide Tateo , Fabio Muratore , Jan Peters

While stochastic variational inference is relatively well known for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models, related methods also offer ways to circumnavigate the approximation of analytically intractable expectations. The key…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-09-08 David A. Knowles

In this paper, we analyze several methods for approximating gradients of noisy functions using only function values. These methods include finite differences, linear interpolation, Gaussian smoothing and smoothing on a sphere. The methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-29 Albert S. Berahas , Liyuan Cao , Krzysztof Choromanski , Katya Scheinberg