Related papers: Steady-State Behavior of Constant-Stepsize Stochas…
In this paper, we establish maximal concentration bounds for the iterates generated by a stochastic approximation (SA) algorithm under a contractive operator with respect to some arbitrary norm (for example, the $\ell_\infty$-norm). We…
In this work, we investigate stochastic approximation (SA) with Markovian data and nonlinear updates under constant stepsize $\alpha>0$. Existing work has primarily focused on either i.i.d. data or linear update rules. We take a new…
Many machine learning and optimization algorithms are built upon the framework of stochastic approximation (SA), for which the selection of step-size (or learning rate) $\{\alpha_n\}$ is crucial for success. An essential condition for…
In this paper, we introduce a new approach to proving the convergence of the Stochastic Approximation (SA) and the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms. The new approach is based on a concept called GSLLN (Generalized Strong Law of…
We analyze the tail behavior of solutions to sample average approximations (SAAs) of stochastic programs posed in Hilbert spaces. We require that the integrand be strongly convex with the same convexity parameter for each realization.…
We establish a data-dependent notion of algorithmic stability for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and employ it to develop novel generalization bounds. This is in contrast to previous distribution-free algorithmic stability results for…
Uniform stability is a notion of algorithmic stability that bounds the worst case change in the model output by the algorithm when a single data point in the dataset is replaced. An influential work of Hardt et al. (2016) provides strong…
We present an estimate of the Wasserstein distance between the data distribution and the generation of score-based generative models. The sampling complexity with respect to dimension is $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{d})$, with a logarithmic constant.…
Sample average approximation (SAA), a popular method for tractably solving stochastic optimization problems, enjoys strong asymptotic performance guarantees in settings with independent training samples. However, these guarantees are not…
Sums of independent, bounded random variables concentrate around their expectation approximately as well a Gaussian of the same variance. Well known results of this form include the Bernstein, Hoeffding, and Chernoff inequalities and many…
This paper presents the first sufficient conditions that guarantee the stability and almost sure convergence of multi-timescale stochastic approximation (SA) iterates. It extends the existing results on one-timescale and two-timescale SA…
We study the approximation of a (finite) continuous-time Markov chain by a Markov chain on a reduced state space, and we provide formal error bounds for the approximated transient distributions in the Wasserstein distance. These bounds…
In this paper, we study the convergence properties of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method for finding a stationary point of a given objective function $J(\cdot)$. The objective function is not required to be convex. Rather, our…
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…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a widely deployed optimization procedure throughout data-driven and simulation-driven disciplines, which has drawn a substantial interest in understanding its global behavior across a broad class of…
In this work, we study the asymptotic randomness of an algorithmic estimator of the saddle point of a globally convex-concave and locally strongly-convex strongly-concave objective. Specifically, we show that the averaged iterates of a…
We propose SWA-Gaussian (SWAG), a simple, scalable, and general purpose approach for uncertainty representation and calibration in deep learning. Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWA), which computes the first moment of stochastic gradient…
The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the classical central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made for…
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…
In recent years, various notions of capacity and complexity have been proposed for characterizing the generalization properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in deep learning. Some of the popular notions that correlate well with the…