Related papers: Time-uniform concentration bounds for iterative al…
A classic problem in statistics is the estimation of the expectation of random variables from samples. This gives rise to the tightly connected problems of deriving concentration inequalities and confidence sequences, that is confidence…
This paper focus on the convergence of stochastic approximation with Nesterov momentum. Nesterov acceleration has proven effective in machine learning for its ability to reduce computational complexity. The issue of delayed information in…
Stochastic optimization via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental problem in statistics and optimization. This paper revisits Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for strongly convex objectives, establishing tight, uniform-in-time…
We provide a brief tutorial on the use of concentration inequalities as they apply to system identification of state-space parameters of linear time invariant systems, with a focus on the fully observed setting. We draw upon tools from the…
We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…
Performance of optimization on quadratic problems sensitively depends on the low-lying part of the spectrum. For large (effectively infinite-dimensional) problems, this part of the spectrum can often be naturally represented or approximated…
In this paper, we develop new optional stopping theorems for scenarios where the stopping rules are defined by bounded continuity regions. Moreover, we establish a wide variety of inequalities on the supremums and infimums of functions of…
We study problem-dependent rates, i.e., generalization errors that scale near-optimally with the variance, the effective loss, or the gradient norms evaluated at the "best hypothesis." We introduce a principled framework dubbed "uniform…
This letter investigates the convergence and concentration properties of the Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) algorithm utilizing biased stochastic subgradients. We establish the almost sure convergence of the algorithm's iterates under the…
We introduce novel convergence results for asynchronous iterations that appear in the analysis of parallel and distributed optimization algorithms. The results are simple to apply and give explicit estimates for how the degree of asynchrony…
We study the convergence properties of the original and away-step Frank-Wolfe algorithms for linearly constrained stochastic optimization assuming the availability of unbiased objective function gradient estimates. The objective function is…
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…
The Robbins-Monro algorithm is a recursive, simulation-based stochastic procedure to approximate the zeros of a function that can be written as an expectation. It is known that under some technical assumptions, Gaussian limit distributions…
We derive novel concentration inequalities that bound the statistical error for a large class of stochastic optimization problems, focusing on the case of unbounded objective functions. Our derivations utilize the following key tools: 1) A…
The convergence rate of stochastic gradient search is analyzed in this paper. Using arguments based on differential geometry and Lojasiewicz inequalities, tight bounds on the convergence rate of general stochastic gradient algorithms are…
With elementary means, we prove a stronger run time guarantee for the univariate marginal distribution algorithm (UMDA) optimizing the LeadingOnes benchmark function in the desirable regime with low genetic drift. If the population size is…
In this paper, we propose a unifying framework incorporating several momentum-related search directions for solving strongly monotone variational inequalities. The specific combinations of the search directions in the framework are made to…
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 obtain optimal Gaussian concentration bounds (GCBs) for stochastic chains of unbounded memory (SCUMs) on countable alphabets. These stochastic processes are also known as "chains with complete connections" or "$g$-measures". We consider…
We consider Riemannian optimization problems with inequality and equality constraints and analyze a class of Riemannian interior point methods for solving them. The algorithm of interest consists of outer and inner iterations. We show that,…