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In this paper, we introduce a new approach to proving the convergence of the Stochastic Approximation (SA) and the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms. The new approach is based on a concept called GSLLN (Generalized Strong Law of…
We consider the stochastic optimization problem with smooth but not necessarily convex objectives in the heavy-tailed noise regime, where the stochastic gradient's noise is assumed to have bounded $p$th moment ($p\in(1,2]$). Zhang et al.…
The focus of this paper is on stochastic variational inequalities (VI) under Markovian noise. A prominent application of our algorithmic developments is the stochastic policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning. Prior…
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…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
SARSA is an on-policy algorithm to learn a Markov decision process policy in reinforcement learning. We investigate the SARSA algorithm with linear function approximation under the non-i.i.d.\ data, where a single sample trajectory is…
High-order tensor methods that employ Taylor-based local models (of degree $p\ge 3$) within adaptive regularization frameworks have been recently proposed for both convex and nonconvex optimization problems. They have been shown to have…
We analyze two communication-efficient algorithms for distributed statistical optimization on large-scale data sets. The first algorithm is a standard averaging method that distributes the $N$ data samples evenly to $\nummac$ machines,…
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…
In this paper, we study a class of stochastic and finite-sum convex optimization problems with deterministic constraints. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-$expectedly\ feasible\ stochastic\ optimal$ solution, in which…
We consider stochastic variational inequality problems where the mapping is monotone over a compact convex set. We present two robust variants of stochastic extragradient algorithms for solving such problems. Of these, the first scheme…
Stochastic time-varying optimization is an integral part of learning in which the shape of the function changes over time in a non-deterministic manner. This paper considers multiple models of stochastic time variation and analyzes the…
This work provides the first finite-time convergence guarantees for linearly constrained stochastic bilevel optimization using only first-order methods, requiring solely gradient information without any Hessian computations or second-order…
We consider stochastic optimization problems with heavy-tailed noise with structured density. For such problems, we show that it is possible to get faster rates of convergence than $\mathcal{O}(K^{-2(\alpha - 1)/\alpha})$, when the…
In this paper, we prove convergence for contractive time discretisation schemes for semi-linear stochastic evolution equations with irregular Lipschitz nonlinearities, initial values, and additive or multiplicative Gaussian noise on…
The aim of this contribution is to address the convergence study of a time and space approximation scheme for an Allen-Cahn problem with constraint and perturbed by a multiplicative noise of It\^o type. The problem is set in a bounded…
We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…
The problem of non-monotone $k$-submodular maximization under a knapsack constraint ($\kSMK$) over the ground set size $n$ has been raised in many applications in machine learning, such as data summarization, information propagation, etc.…
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…
Two OFFO (Objective-Function Free Optimization) noise tolerant algorithms are presented that handle bound constraints, inexact gradients and use second-order information when available.The first is a multi-level method exploiting a…