Related papers: Smoothing-Enabled Randomized Stochastic Gradient S…
Convergence to a saddle point for convex-concave functions has been studied for decades, while recent years has seen a surge of interest in non-convex (zero-sum) smooth games, motivated by their recent wide applications. It remains an…
For finite-dimensional problems, stochastic approximation methods have long been used to solve stochastic optimization problems. Their application to infinite-dimensional problems is less understood, particularly for nonconvex objectives.…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
This paper studies a structured compound stochastic program (SP) involving multiple expectations coupled by nonconvex and nonsmooth functions. We present a successive convex-programming based sampling algorithm and establish its…
In this paper, we study stochastic non-convex optimization with non-convex random functions. Recent studies on non-convex optimization revolve around establishing second-order convergence, i.e., converging to a nearly second-order optimal…
Nonsmooth sparsity constrained optimization encompasses a broad spectrum of applications in machine learning. This problem is generally non-convex and NP-hard. Existing solutions to this problem exhibit several notable limitations,…
This paper studies non-smooth problems of convex stochastic optimization. Using the smoothing technique based on the replacement of the function value at the considered point by the averaged function value over a ball (in $l_1$-norm or…
A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…
We consider the problem of computing the maximal probability of satisfying an omega-regular specification for stochastic nonlinear systems evolving in discrete time. The problem reduces, after automata-theoretic constructions, to finding…
In this work, we consider convex optimization problems with smooth objective function and nonsmooth functional constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called Stochastic Halfspace Approximation Method (SHAM), to solve…
In this paper, we consider constrained optimization problems with convex, smooth objective and constraints. We propose a new stochastic gradient algorithm, called the Stochastic Moving Ball Approximation (SMBA) method, to solve this class…
We study a class of stochastic target games where one player tries to find a strategy such that the state process almost-surely reaches a given target, no matter which action is chosen by the opponent. Our main result is a geometric dynamic…
We propose the first loss function for approximate Nash equilibria of normal-form games that is amenable to unbiased Monte Carlo estimation. This construction allows us to deploy standard non-convex stochastic optimization techniques for…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
We present a new, stochastic variant of the projective splitting (PS) family of algorithms for monotone inclusion problems. It can solve min-max and noncooperative game formulations arising in applications such as robust ML without the…
Nonsmooth nonconvex-concave minimax problems have attracted significant attention due to their wide applications in many fields. In this paper, we consider a class of nonsmooth nonconvex-concave minimax problems on Riemannian manifolds.…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of large-scale learning, yet classical analyses rely on assumptions that can be either too strong (bounded variance) or too coarse (uniform noise). The expected smoothness (ES) condition…
Block coordinate descent methods and stochastic subgradient methods have been extensively studied in optimization and machine learning. By combining randomized block sampling with stochastic subgradient methods based on dual averaging, we…
Recent results in non-convex stochastic optimization demonstrate the convergence of popular adaptive algorithms (e.g., AdaGrad) under the $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness condition, but the rate of convergence is a higher-order polynomial in terms…
A fundamental shortcoming of the concept of Nash equilibrium is its computational intractability: approximating Nash equilibria in normal-form games is PPAD-hard. In this paper, inspired by the ideas of smoothed analysis, we introduce a…