Related papers: Almost Sure Convergence of Stochastic Approximatio…
Establishing almost sure convergence rates for stochastic approximation and reinforcement learning under Markovian noise is a fundamental theoretical challenge. We make progress towards this challenge for a class of stochastic approximation…
In this paper, we study the almost sure boundedness and the convergence of the stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm. At present, most available convergence proofs are based on the ODE method, and the almost sure boundedness of the…
This paper establishes the first almost sure convergence rate and the first maximal concentration bound with exponential tails for general contractive stochastic approximation algorithms with Markovian noise. As a corollary, we also obtain…
Motivated by applications in reinforcement learning (RL), we study a nonlinear stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm under Markovian noise, and establish its finite-sample convergence bounds under various stepsizes. Specifically, we show…
We consider the stochastic optimization problem with smooth but not necessarily convex objectives in the heavy-tailed noise regime, where the stochastic gradient's noise is assumed to have bounded $p$th moment ($p\in(1,2]$). Zhang et al.…
We study the almost sure convergence of randomly truncated stochastic algorithms. We present a new convergence theorem which extends the already known results by making vanish the classical condition on the noise terms. The aim of this work…
This paper derives non-asymptotic error bounds for nonlinear stochastic approximation algorithms in the Wasserstein-$p$ distance. To obtain explicit finite-sample guarantees for the last iterate, we develop a coupling argument that compares…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…
Motivated by the widespread use of temporal-difference (TD-) and Q-learning algorithms in reinforcement learning, this paper studies a class of biased stochastic approximation (SA) procedures under a mild "ergodic-like" assumption on the…
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…
Recent studies have provided both empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in various scenarios. Such heavy tails potentially result in iterates with diverging…
We study equilibrium selection for invariant measures of stochastic dynamical systems with constant step size, under persistent noise and minimal moment assumptions, in a general quasi-Feller framework. Such dynamics arise in…
The stochastic three points (STP) algorithm is a derivative-free optimization technique designed for unconstrained optimization problems in $\mathbb{R}^d$. In this paper, we analyze this algorithm for three classes of functions: smooth…
Recently, several studies consider the stochastic optimization problem but in a heavy-tailed noise regime, i.e., the difference between the stochastic gradient and the true gradient is assumed to have a finite $p$-th moment (say being upper…
Constant-stepsize stochastic approximation (SA) is widely used in learning for computational efficiency. For a fixed stepsize, the iterates typically admit a stationary distribution that is rarely tractable. Prior work shows that as the…
We establish maximal concentration bounds for the iterates generated by stochastic approximation algorithms with general step sizes, where the noise has a finite-state Markovian component plus a Martingale-difference component. When the…
We study the so-called two-time-scale stochastic approximation, a simulation-based approach for finding the roots of two coupled nonlinear operators. Our focus is to characterize its finite-time performance in a Markov setting, which often…
Recently, many machine learning optimizers have been analysed considering them as the asymptotic limit of some differential equations when the step size goes to zero. In other words, the optimizers can be seen as a finite difference scheme…
Stochastic sequential quadratic optimization (SQP) methods for solving continuous optimization problems with nonlinear equality constraints have attracted attention recently, such as for solving large-scale data-fitting problems subject to…
Our main result is to prove almost-sure convergence of a stochastic-approximation algorithm defined on the space of measures on a non-compact space. Our motivation is to apply this result to measure-valued P\'olya processes (MVPPs, also…