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We aim to make stochastic gradient descent (SGD) adaptive to (i) the noise $\sigma^2$ in the stochastic gradients and (ii) problem-dependent constants. When minimizing smooth, strongly-convex functions with condition number $\kappa$, we…
The Wasserstein distance has emerged as a key metric to quantify distances between probability distributions, with applications in various fields, including machine learning, control theory, decision theory, and biological systems.…
Stochastic approximation (SA) is a powerful class of iterative algorithms for nonlinear root-finding that can be used for minimizing a loss function, $L(\boldsymbol{\theta})$, with respect to a parameter vector $\boldsymbol{\theta}$, when…
Concentration inequalities form an essential toolkit in the study of high dimensional (HD) statistical methods. Most of the relevant statistics literature in this regard is based on sub-Gaussian or sub-exponential tail assumptions. In this…
Applying standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to large data sets is computationally infeasible. The recently proposed stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) method circumvents this problem in three ways: it generates…
While the convergence behaviors of stochastic gradient methods are well understood \emph{in expectation}, there still exist many gaps in the understanding of their convergence with \emph{high probability}, where the convergence rate has a…
Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence…
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,…
Analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants typically relies on the assumption of uniformly bounded variance, a condition that frequently fails in practical non-convex settings, such as neural network training, as well as…
We consider $d$-dimensional linear stochastic approximation algorithms (LSAs) with a constant step-size and the so called Polyak-Ruppert (PR) averaging of iterates. LSAs are widely applied in machine learning and reinforcement learning…
This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and…
This article suggests that deterministic Gradient Descent, which does not use any stochastic gradient approximation, can still exhibit stochastic behaviors. In particular, it shows that if the objective function exhibit multiscale…
Discrete time analogues of ergodic stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are one of the most popular and flexible tools for sampling high-dimensional probability measures. Non-asymptotic analysis in the $L^2$ Wasserstein distance of…
The steady-state approximation (hereafter abbreviated as SSA) consists in setting $dy/dt=0$, where $y$ denotes the concentration of a short-lived intermediate subject to first-order decay with a rate constant $k$. The sole reason for…
Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…
This paper investigates the stability and convergence properties of asynchronous stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms, with a focus on extensions relevant to average-reward reinforcement learning. We first extend a stability proof…
Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a popular variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent, where properly scaled isotropic Gaussian noise is added to an unbiased estimate of the gradient at each iteration. This modest change allows…
In this paper, we establish the non-asymptotic validity of the multiplier bootstrap procedure for constructing the confidence sets using the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm. Under appropriate regularity conditions, our approach…
We provide a general steady-state diffusion approximation result which bounds the Wasserstein distance between the reversible measure $\mu$ of a diffusion process and the measure $\nu$ of an approximating Markov chain. Our result is…
Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a popular approach for solving fixed-point equations where the information is corrupted by noise. In this paper, we consider an SA involving a contraction mapping with respect to an arbitrary norm, and show…