Related papers: A companion for the Kiefer--Wolfowitz--Blum stocha…
Diffusion approximation provides weak approximation for stochastic gradient descent algorithms in a finite time horizon. In this paper, we introduce new tools motivated by the backward error analysis of numerical stochastic differential…
The Frank-Wolfe (FW) method is a popular approach for solving optimization problems with structured constraints that arise in machine learning applications. In recent years, stochastic versions of FW have gained popularity, motivated by…
We consider the minimization of a sum of an expectation-valued coordinate-wise $L_i$-smooth nonconvex function and a nonsmooth block-separable convex regularizer. We propose an asynchronous variance-reduced algorithm, where in each…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
We show that the Wang-Landau algorithm can be formulated as a stochastic gradient descent algorithm minimizing a smooth and convex objective function, of which the gradient is estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo iterations. The…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
We propose a randomized lattice algorithm for approximating multivariate periodic functions over the $d$-dimensional unit cube from the weighted Korobov space with mixed smoothness $\alpha > 1/2$ and product weights…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
This paper studies the distributed adaptiveestimation problems for stochastic large regression modelswith an infinite number of parameters. By constructing a re-cursive local cost function, we propose a novel distributedrecursive least…
We propose Frank--Wolfe (FW) algorithms with an adaptive Bregman step-size strategy for smooth adaptable (also called: relatively smooth) (weakly-) convex functions. This means that the gradient of the objective function is not necessarily…
Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ oracle complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary…
We present a computational approach to solution of the Kiefer-Weiss problem. Algorithms for construction of the optimal sampling plans and evaluation of their performance are proposed. In the particular case of Bernoulli observations, the…
A Stiefel manifold of the compact type is often encountered in many fields of Engineering including, signal and image processing, machine learning, numerical optimization and others. The Stiefel manifold is a Riemannian homogeneous space…
Using lattice approximations of Euclidean space, we develop a way to approximate stable processes that are represented by stochastic integrals over Euclidean space. Via a stable version of the Lindeberg-Feller Theorem we show that the…
We study the approximation of arbitrary distributions $P$ on $d$-dimensional space by distributions with log-concave density. Approximation means minimizing a Kullback--Leibler-type functional. We show that such an approximation exists if…
This paper studies optimal designs for linear regression models with correlated effects for single responses. We introduce the concept of rhombic design to reduce the computational complexity and find a semi-algebraic description for the…
In this paper we develop proximal methods for statistical learning. Proximal point algorithms are useful in statistics and machine learning for obtaining optimization solutions for composite functions. Our approach exploits closed-form…
This paper presents an efficient algorithm for the progressive approximation of Wasserstein barycenters of persistence diagrams, with applications to the visual analysis of ensemble data. Given a set of scalar fields, our approach enables…
The asymptotic behavior of stochastic gradient algorithms is studied. Relying on results from differential geometry (Lojasiewicz gradient inequality), the single limit-point convergence of the algorithm iterates is demonstrated and…
Many machine learning and optimization algorithms can be cast as instances of stochastic approximation (SA). The convergence rate of these algorithms is known to be slow, with the optimal mean squared error (MSE) of order $O(n^{-1})$. In…