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This paper concerns a high-dimensional stochastic programming problem of minimizing a function of expected cost with a matrix argument. To this problem, one of the most widely applied solution paradigms is the sample average approximation…
We developed a corporative stochastic approximation (CSA) type algorithm for semi-infinite programming (SIP), where the cut generation problem is solved inexactly. First, we provide general error bounds for inexact CSA. Then, we propose two…
This paper concerns quasi-stochastic approximation (QSA) to solve root finding problems commonly found in applications to optimization and reinforcement learning. The general constant gain algorithm may be expressed as the…
In this work, we investigate stochastic approximation (SA) with Markovian data and nonlinear updates under constant stepsize $\alpha>0$. Existing work has primarily focused on either i.i.d. data or linear update rules. We take a new…
We consider the dynamics of a linear stochastic approximation algorithm driven by Markovian noise, and derive finite-time bounds on the moments of the error, i.e., deviation of the output of the algorithm from the equilibrium point of an…
Multi-time-scale stochastic approximation is an iterative algorithm for finding the fixed point of a set of $N$ coupled operators given their noisy samples. It has been observed that due to the coupling between the decision variables and…
Theory and application of stochastic approximation (SA) have become increasingly relevant due in part to applications in optimization and reinforcement learning. This paper takes a new look at SA with constant step-size $\alpha>0$, defined…
Previous studies on two-timescale stochastic approximation (SA) mainly focused on bounding mean-squared errors under diminishing stepsize schemes. In this work, we investigate {\it constant} stpesize schemes through the lens of Markov…
Clustering is a fundamental problem in unsupervised learning, and has been studied widely both as a problem of learning mixture models and as an optimization problem. In this paper, we study clustering with respect the emph{k-median}…
We propose an adaptive accelerated smoothing technique for a nonsmooth convex optimization problem where the smoothing update rule is coupled with the momentum parameter. We also extend the setting to the case where the objective function…
This paper considers the problem of minimizing a convex expectation function with a set of inequality convex expectation constraints. We present a computable stochastic approximation type algorithm, namely the stochastic linearized proximal…
We consider the optimization of a quadratic objective function whose gradients are only accessible through a stochastic oracle that returns the gradient at any given point plus a zero-mean finite variance random error. We present the first…
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…
We consider constrained optimization problems with a nonsmooth objective function in the form of mathematical expectation. The Sample Average Approximation (SAA) is used to estimate the objective function and variable sample size strategy…
We propose a stochastic approximation (SA) based method with randomization of samples for policy evaluation using the least squares temporal difference (LSTD) algorithm. Our proposed scheme is equivalent to running regular temporal…
We study time-uniform statistical inference for parameters in stochastic approximation (SA), which encompasses a bunch of applications in optimization and machine learning. To that end, we analyze the almost-sure convergence rates of the…
In this paper, we consider multi-stage stochastic optimization problems with convex objectives and conic constraints at each stage. We present a new stochastic first-order method, namely the dynamic stochastic approximation (DSA) algorithm,…
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…
Given an ODE and its perturbation, the Alekseev formula expresses the solutions of the latter in terms related to the former. By exploiting this formula and a new concentration inequality for martingale-differences, we develop a novel…
The ODE method has been a workhorse for algorithm design and analysis since the introduction of the stochastic approximation. It is now understood that convergence theory amounts to establishing robustness of Euler approximations for ODEs,…