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Stochastic equations play an important role in computational science, due to their ability to treat a wide variety of complex statistical problems. However, current algorithms are strongly limited by their sampling variance, which scales…
A framework is introduced for solving a sequence of slowly changing optimization problems, including those arising in regression and classification applications, using optimization algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The…
The theory of stochastic approximations form the theoretical foundation for studying convergence properties of many popular recursive learning algorithms in statistics, machine learning and statistical physics. Large deviations for…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the workhorse algorithm of deep learning technology. At each step of the training phase, a mini batch of samples is drawn from the training dataset and the weights of the neural network are adjusted…
High-probability guarantees in stochastic optimization are often obtained only under strong noise assumptions such as sub-Gaussian tails. We show that such guarantees can also be achieved under the weaker assumption of bounded variance by…
We consider a step search method for continuous optimization under a stochastic setting where the function values and gradients are available only through inexact probabilistic zeroth- and first-order oracles. Unlike the stochastic gradient…
We study gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize for $\ell_2$-regularized logistic regression with linearly separable data. Classical theory suggests small stepsizes to ensure monotonic reduction of the optimization objective,…
In empirical risk optimization, it has been observed that stochastic gradient implementations that rely on random reshuffling of the data achieve better performance than implementations that rely on sampling the data uniformly. Recent works…
In this paper, we develop convergence analysis of a modified line search method for objective functions whose value is computed with noise and whose gradient estimates are inexact and possibly random. The noise is assumed to be bounded in…
We consider the problem of fitting variational posterior approximations using stochastic optimization methods. The performance of these approximations depends on (1) how well the variational family matches the true posterior…
We consider convex stochastic optimization problems under different assumptions on the properties of available stochastic subgradient. It is known that, if the value of the objective function is available, one can obtain, in parallel,…
We consider a stochastic optimization problem involving two random variables: a context variable $X$ and a dependent variable $Y$. The objective is to minimize the expected value of a nonlinear loss functional applied to the conditional…
Constant step-size Stochastic Gradient Descent exhibits two phases: a transient phase during which iterates make fast progress towards the optimum, followed by a stationary phase during which iterates oscillate around the optimal point. In…
A fundamental challenge in deep learning is that the optimal step sizes for update steps of stochastic gradient descent are unknown. In traditional optimization, line searches are used to determine good step sizes, however, in deep…
Motivated by programmatic advertising optimization, we consider the task of sequentially allocating budget across a set of resources. At every time step, a feasible allocation is chosen and only a corresponding random return is observed.…
In this paper, we study smooth stochastic multi-level composition optimization problems, where the objective function is a nested composition of $T$ functions. We assume access to noisy evaluations of the functions and their gradients,…
In pool-based active learning, the learner is given an unlabeled data set and aims to efficiently learn the unknown hypothesis by querying the labels of the data points. This can be formulated as the classical Optimal Decision Tree (ODT)…
Stochastic gradient descent is one of the most successful approaches for solving large-scale problems, especially in machine learning and statistics. At each iteration, it employs an unbiased estimator of the full gradient computed from one…
Optimization problems with continuous data appear in, e.g., robust machine learning, functional data analysis, and variational inference. Here, the target function is given as an integral over a family of (continuously) indexed target…
We develop a prototypical stochastic model for local search around a given home. The stochastic dynamic model is motivated by experimental findings of the motion of a fruit fly around a given spot of food but shall generally describe local…