Related papers: $O(1/k)$ Finite-Time Bound for Non-Linear Two-Time…
We establish the O($\frac{1}{k}$) convergence rate for distributed stochastic gradient methods that operate over strongly convex costs and random networks. The considered class of methods is standard each node performs a weighted average of…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
We present a new approximation algorithm for the treewidth problem which finds an upper bound on the treewidth and constructs a corresponding tree decomposition as well. Our algorithm is a faster variation of Reed's classical algorithm. For…
In this paper we consider the problem of maximizing the Area under the ROC curve (AUC) which is a widely used performance metric in imbalanced classification and anomaly detection. Due to the pairwise nonlinearity of the objective function,…
A stochastic iterative algorithm approximating second-order information using von Neumann series is discussed. We present convergence guarantees for strongly-convex and smooth functions. Our analysis is much simpler in contrast to a similar…
This paper considers the smooth bilevel optimization in which the lower-level problem is strongly convex and the upper-level problem is possibly nonconvex. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access the unbiased…
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…
A step-search sequential quadratic programming method is proposed for solving nonlinear equality constrained stochastic optimization problems. It is assumed that constraint function values and derivatives are available, but only stochastic…
It is well known that both gradient descent and stochastic coordinate descent achieve a global convergence rate of $O(1/k)$ in the objective value, when applied to a scheme for minimizing a Lipschitz-continuously differentiable,…
Hyperparameter tuning is a common technique for improving the performance of neural networks. Most techniques for hyperparameter search involve an iterated process where the model is retrained at every iteration. However, the expected…
We present a finite-time analysis of two smoothed functional stochastic approximation algorithms for simulation-based optimization. The first is a two time-scale gradient-based method, while the second is a three time-scale Newton-based…
Optimal stopping is the problem of determining when to stop a stochastic system in order to maximize reward, which is of practical importance in domains such as finance, operations management and healthcare. Existing methods for…
We study the common continual learning setup where an overparameterized model is sequentially fitted to a set of jointly realizable tasks. We analyze forgetting, defined as the loss on previously seen tasks, after $k$ iterations. For…
We give new sublinear and parallel algorithms for the extensively studied problem of approximating n-variable r-CSPs (constraint satisfaction problems with constraints of arity r up to an additive error. The running time of our algorithms…
We consider Linear Stochastic Approximation (LSA) with a constant stepsize and Markovian data. Viewing the joint process of the data and LSA iterate as a time-homogeneous Markov chain, we prove its convergence to a unique limiting and…
We study the finite-time behaviour of the popular temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm when combined with tail-averaging. We derive finite time bounds on the parameter error of the tail-averaged TD iterate under a step-size choice…
This paper introduces a class of two-stage stochastic minimax problems where the first-stage objective function is nonconvex-concave while the second-stage objective function is strongly convex-concave. We establish properties of the…
Stochastic iterative algorithms, including stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD), are widely utilized for optimization and sampling in large-scale and high-dimensional problems in machine…
In this paper we consider the problem of obtaining sharp bounds for the performance of temporal difference (TD) methods with linear function approximation for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes. We show that a simple…
We develop polynomial-time algorithms for near-optimal minimax mean estimation under $\ell_2$-squared loss in a Gaussian sequence model under convex constraints. The parameter space is an origin-symmetric, type-2 convex body $K \subset…