Unit excitation (UE) is a common assumption in stochastic saddle avoidance: the stochastic error must have a uniformly positive component along every direction, in expectation. This condition gives a direct way to rule out convergence to strict saddles, but it also oversimplifies the actual noise structure, and does not match many stochastic optimization regimes.
arXiv:2608. 05460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work introduces a proximal stochastic subgradient method for minimizing the sum of an expected cost, whose integrand is potentially nonsmooth and nonconvex, and a lower semicontinuous, prox-bounded function.
By Felipe Atenas, Alejandro Jofr\'e, Pedro P\'erez-Aros, David Torregrosa-Bel\'en
arXiv:2606. 00520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many stochastic gradient methods are believed not to converge when the noise in stochastic gradients has only a finite $p$-th moment for $p\in\left(1,2\right)$, a setting known as the heavy-tailed noise assumption.
By Zijian Liu
arXiv:2606. 03769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the robustness of stochastic mirror descent (SMD) under heavy-tailed noise, focusing on whether the method retains its convergence guarantees when run with infinite-variance stochastic gradient input.
By Pierre-Louis Cauvin, Panayotis Mertikopoulos
arXiv:2510. 10697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We define a stochastic variant of the proximal point algorithm in the general setting of nonlinear Hadamard spaces for approximating zeros of the mean of a stochastically perturbed monotone vector field.
By Nicholas Pischke
arXiv:2607. 09097v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study stochastic fixed-point equations $\mathbf{T}(\mathbf{x}) = \mathbf{x}$ over normed spaces $(\mathcal{E}, \|\cdot\|)$, where the operator $\mathbf{T}$ is nonexpansive or contractive and is accessed only through unbiased stochastic evaluations with bounded second central moment.
By Jelena Diakonikolas
arXiv:2607. 15412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-objective learning (MOL) aims to optimize multiple objectives simultaneously.
By Chentong Huang, Lisha Chen
arXiv:2604. 08580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reward fine-tuning of diffusion and flow models and sampling from tilted or Boltzmann distributions can both be formulated as stochastic optimal control (SOC) problems, where learning an optimal generative dynamics corresponds to optimizing a control under SDE constraints.
By Carles Domingo-Enrich, Jiequn Han
arXiv:2504. 09951v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We revisit a classical assumption for analyzing stochastic gradient algorithms where the squared norm of the stochastic subgradient (or the variance for smooth problems) is allowed to grow as fast as the squared norm of the optimization variable.
By Ahmet Alacaoglu, Yura Malitsky, Stephen J. Wright
arXiv:2608. 06182v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study stochastic extragradient (SEG) methods for solving monotone variational inequality problems (VIPs) over a feasible set.
By TaeHo Yoon, Nicolas Loizou
arXiv:2607. 06883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of finding stationary points for stochastic convex optimization problems.
By Felipe Areces, John Duchi, Malo Sommers
arXiv:2307. 10053v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we focus on providing convergence guarantees for stochastic subgradient methods in minimizing nonsmooth nonconvex functions.
By Nachuan Xiao, Xiaoyin Hu, Kim-Chuan Toh