Related papers: Zeroth-order gradient estimators for stochastic pr…
A stochastic gradient method for finite-sum minimization subject to deterministic linear constraints is proposed and analyzed. The procedure presented adapts the projected gradient method on convex set to the use of both a stochastic…
Our work focuses on stochastic gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer. Research on this class of problem is quite limited, and until recently no non-asymptotic convergence…
In the past few years, following the differentiable programming paradigm, there has been a growing interest in computing the gradient information of physical processes (e.g., physical simulation, image rendering). However, such processes…
We consider a class of hierarchical multi-agent optimization problems over networks where agents seek to compute an approximate solution to a single-stage stochastic mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC). MPECs subsume…
Standard approaches to stochastic gradient estimation, with only noisy black-box function evaluations, use the finite-difference method or its variants. While natural, it is open to our knowledge whether their statistical accuracy is the…
Stochastic optimization lies at the core of most statistical learning models. The recent great development of stochastic algorithmic tools focused significantly onto proximal gradient iterations, in order to find an efficient approach for…
Smoothed functional (SF) schemes for gradient estimation are known to be efficient in stochastic optimization algorithms, specially when the objective is to improve the performance of a stochastic system. However, the performance of these…
Distributed multi-agent optimization finds many applications in distributed learning, control, estimation, etc. Most existing algorithms assume knowledge of first-order information of the objective and have been analyzed for convex…
Decentralized methods to solve finite-sum minimization problems are important in many signal processing and machine learning tasks where the data is distributed over a network of nodes and raw data sharing is not permitted due to privacy…
Distributed optimization is the standard way of speeding up machine learning training, and most of the research in the area focuses on distributed first-order, gradient-based methods. Yet, there are settings where some…
In this work we investigate the practicality of stochastic gradient descent and recently introduced variants with variance-reduction techniques in imaging inverse problems. Such algorithms have been shown in the machine learning literature…
In this work, we propose a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) framework to design data-driven policy gradient descent algorithms for the linear quadratic regulator problem. Two alternative schemes are considered to estimate the policy…
We consider distributed optimization over networks where each agent is associated with a smooth and strongly convex local objective function. We assume that the agents only have access to unbiased estimators of the gradient of their…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
Gradient-based methods enable efficient search capabilities in high dimensions. However, in order to apply them effectively in offline optimization paradigms such as offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Imitation Learning (IL), we require…
We propose a novel zeroth-order optimization algorithm based on an efficient sampling strategy. Under mild global regularity conditions on the objective function, we establish non-asymptotic convergence rates for the proposed method.…
We address composite optimization problems, which consist in minimizing the sum of a smooth and a merely lower semicontinuous function, without any convexity assumptions. Numerical solutions of these problems can be obtained by proximal…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
This paper investigates a category of constrained fractional optimization problems that emerge in various practical applications. The objective function for this category is characterized by the ratio of a numerator and denominator, both…
In stochastic zeroth-order optimization, a problem of practical relevance is understanding how to fully exploit the local geometry of the underlying objective function. We consider a fundamental setting in which the objective function is…