Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS 2013)
Mehrdad Mahdavi, Tianbao Yang, Rong Jin
In this paper, we are interested in the development of efficient algorithms for convex optimization problems in the simultaneous presence of multiple objectives and stochasticity in the first-order information. We cast the stochastic multiple objective optimization problem into a constrained optimization problem by choosing one function as the objective and try to bound other objectives by appropriate thresholds. We first examine a two stages exploration-exploitation based algorithm which first approximates the stochastic objectives by sampling and then solves a constrained stochastic optimization problem by projected gradient method. This method attains a suboptimal convergence rate even under strong assumption on the objectives. Our second approach is an efficient primal-dual stochastic algorithm. It leverages on the theory of Lagrangian method in constrained optimization and attains the optimal convergence rate of $[O(1/ \sqrt{T})]$ in high probability for general Lipschitz continuous objectives.