Related papers: Sequential test sampling for stochastic derivative…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with mini-batching is a standard tool in large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical properties under heavy-tailed gradient noise remain largely unexplored. In this paper we study SGD with increasing…
In the problem of active sequential hypothesis testing (ASHT), a learner seeks to identify the true hypothesis from among a known set of hypotheses. The learner is given a set of actions and knows the random distribution of the outcome of…
We propose a trust-region stochastic sequential quadratic programming algorithm (TR-StoSQP) to solve nonlinear optimization problems with stochastic objectives and deterministic equality constraints. We consider a fully stochastic setting,…
A signal recovery problem is considered, where the same binary testing problem is posed over multiple, independent data streams. The goal is to identify all signals, i.e., streams where the alternative hypothesis is correct, and noises,…
Suppose that at any stage of a statistical experiment a control variable $X$ that affects the distribution of the observed data $Y$ can be used. The distribution of $Y$ depends on some unknown parameter $\theta$, and we consider the…
This paper considers the efficient minimization of the infinite time average of a stationary ergodic process in the space of a handful of design parameters which affect it. Problems of this class, derived from physical or numerical…
We study a class of two-stage stochastic programs in which the second stage includes a set of components with uncertain capacity, and the expression for the distribution function of the uncertain capacity includes first-stage variables.…
In this paper, we introduce various mechanisms to obtain accelerated first-order stochastic optimization algorithms when the objective function is convex or strongly convex. Specifically, we extend the Catalyst approach originally designed…
Choosing appropriate step sizes is critical for reducing the computational cost of training large-scale neural network models. Mini-batch sub-sampling (MBSS) is often employed for computational tractability. However, MBSS introduces a…
This paper studies model checking for general parametric regression models having no dimension reduction structures on the predictor vector. Using any U-statistic type test as an initial test, this paper combines the sample-splitting and…
We propose and analyze a sequential quadratic programming algorithm for minimizing a noisy nonlinear smooth function subject to noisy nonlinear smooth equality constraints. The algorithm uses a step decomposition strategy and, as a result,…
We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…
We develop an algorithm for minimizing a function using $n$ batched function value measurements at each of $T$ rounds by using classifiers to identify a function's sublevel set. We show that sufficiently accurate classifiers can achieve…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
In this work, we consider solving optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints. We propose a Trust-Region Sequential Quadratic Programming method to find both first- and second-order stationary…
We consider a class of stochastic gradient optimization schemes. Assuming that the objective function is strongly convex, we prove weak error estimates which are uniform in time for the error between the solution of the numerical scheme,…
This work proposes a framework, embedded within the Performance Estimation framework (PEP), for obtaining worst-case performance guarantees on stochastic first-order methods. Given a first-order method, a function class, and a noise model…
Finite-context models (FCMs) are widely used for compressing symbolic sequences such as DNA, where predictive performance depends critically on the context length k and smoothing parameter {\alpha}. In practice, these hyperparameters are…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
We consider a decision maker who must choose an action in order to maximize a reward function that depends also on an unknown parameter {\Theta}. The decision maker can delay taking the action in order to experiment and gather additional…