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This paper studies the exponential stability of random matrix products driven by a general (possibly unbounded) state space Markov chain. It is a cornerstone in the analysis of stochastic algorithms in machine learning (e.g. for parameter…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-02 Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov , Hoi-To Wai

Sample average approximation (SAA) is a tractable approach for dealing with chance constrained programming, a challenging stochastic optimization problem. The constraint of SAA is characterized by the $0/1$ loss function which results in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Shenglong Zhou , Lili Pan , Naihua Xiu , Geoffrey Ye Li

Strong approximation errors of both finite element semi-discretization and spatio-temporal full discretization are analyzed for the stochastic Allen-Cahn equation driven by additive noise in space dimension $d \leq 3$. The full…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-08-04 Ruisheng Qi , Xiaojie Wang

Regularized Markov Decision Processes serve as models of sequential decision making under uncertainty wherein the decision maker has limited information processing capacity and/or aversion to model ambiguity. With functional approximation,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jiachen Xi , Alfredo Garcia , Petar Momcilovic

We develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-05 Wenjie Huang , William B. Haskell

In this work, we study the asymptotic randomness of an algorithmic estimator of the saddle point of a globally convex-concave and locally strongly-convex strongly-concave objective. Specifically, we show that the averaged iterates of a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Abhishek Roy , Yi-An Ma

Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-02 Eduard Gorbunov , Marina Danilova , Innokentiy Shibaev , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

This paper derives non-asymptotic error bounds for nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms in the Wasserstein-$p$ distance. To obtain explicit finite-sample guarantees for the last iterate, we develop a coupling argument that compares…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Seo Taek Kong , R. Srikant

We study weighted Tikhonov regularization for large-scale linear discrete ill-posed problems with random noise. Under a polynomial upper-bound assumption on the generalized eigenvalues of the discrete forward operator, we derive stochastic…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Duan-Peng Ling , Wenlong Zhang

This paper focuses on deriving optimal-order full moment error estimates in strong norms for both velocity and pressure approximations in the Euler-Maruyama time discretization of the stochastic Navier-Stokes equations with multiplicative…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-10-10 Xiaobing Feng , Liet Vo

We consider stochastic approximation for the least squares regression problem in the non-strongly convex setting. We present the first practical algorithm that achieves the optimal prediction error rates in terms of dependence on the noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Aditya Varre , Nicolas Flammarion

Stochastic convex optimization problems with nonlinear functional constraints are ubiquitous in signal processing applications including constrained least-squares, set-membership adaptive filtering, and trajectory optimization under…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-16 Panchajanya Sanyal , Srujan Teja Thomdapu , Ketan Rajawat

This paper studies sample average approximation (SAA) in solving convex or strongly convex stochastic programming (SP) problems. In estimating SAA's sample efficiency, the state-of-the-art sample complexity bounds entail metric entropy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Hongcheng Liu , Jindong Tong

Actor-critic style two-time-scale algorithms are one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning, and have seen great empirical success. However, their performance is not completely understood theoretically. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Sajad Khodadadian , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg , Siva Theja Maguluri

We consider stochastic strongly-convex-strongly-concave (SCSC) saddle point (SP) problems which frequently arise in applications ranging from distributionally robust learning to game theory and fairness in machine learning. We focus on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-17 Yassine Laguel , Necdet Serhat Aybat , Mert Gürbüzbalaban

In this paper we study the asymptotic behavior of a stochastic approximation scheme on two timescales with set-valued drift functions and in the presence of non-additive iterate-dependent Markov noise. It is shown that the recursion on each…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-11-21 Vinayaka Yaji , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We consider minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function using a stochastic Newton method. At each iteration, the algorithm is given an oracle access to a stochastic estimate of the Hessian matrix. The oracle model includes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-29 Sen Na , Michał Dereziński , Michael W. Mahoney

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

We establish rigorous \emph{a posteriori} error bounds for a space-time finite element method of arbitrary order discretising linear wave problems in second order formulation. The method combines standard finite elements in space and…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Zhaonan Dong , Emmanuil H. Georgoulis , Lorenzo Mascotto , Zuodong Wang

In this paper, we study the bias and high-order error bounds of the Linear Stochastic Approximation (LSA) algorithm with Polyak-Ruppert (PR) averaging under Markovian noise. We focus on the version of the algorithm with constant step size…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-08 Ilya Levin , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov