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A recursive estimator of the conditional geometric median in Hilbert spaces is studied. It is based on a stochastic gradient algorithm whose aim is to minimize a weighted L1 criterion and is consequently well adapted for robust online…
This paper considers a distributed stochastic strongly convex optimization, where agents connected over a network aim to cooperatively minimize the average of all agents' local cost functions. Due to the stochasticity of gradient estimation…
We prove rates of convergence in the statistical sense for kernel-based least squares regression using a conjugate gradient algorithm, where regularization against overfitting is obtained by early stopping. This method is directly related…
Bayesian inference problems require sampling or approximating high-dimensional probability distributions. The focus of this paper is on the recently introduced Stein variational gradient descent methodology, a class of algorithms that rely…
In distributed optimization problems, a technique called gradient coding, which involves replicating data points, has been used to mitigate the effect of straggling machines. Recent work has studied approximate gradient coding, which…
Preconditioning is a crucial operation in gradient-based numerical optimisation. It helps decrease the local condition number of a function by appropriately transforming its gradient. For a convex function, where the gradient can be…
This paper can be seen as an attempt of rethinking the {\em Extra-Gradient Philosophy} for solving Variational Inequality Problems. We show that the properly defined {\em Reduced Gradients} can be used instead for finding approximate…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
The breakthrough ideas in the modern proximal splitting methodologies allow us to express the set of all minimizers of a superposition of multiple nonsmooth convex functions as the fixed point set of computable nonexpansive operators. In…
A subgradient method is presented for solving general convex optimization problems, the main requirement being that a strictly-feasible point is known. A feasible sequence of iterates is generated, which converges to within user-specified…
In this paper, a new optimization framework is defined that includes the optimization framework recently proposed in [1]-[2] as a special case. The convex optimization in [1]-[2] includes centralized optimization and distributed…
Many practitioners who use the EM algorithm complain that it is sometimes slow. When does this happen, and what can be done about it? In this paper, we study the general class of bound optimization algorithms - including…
Tuning hyperparameters of learning algorithms is hard because gradients are usually unavailable. We compute exact gradients of cross-validation performance with respect to all hyperparameters by chaining derivatives backwards through the…
We introduce a general method for improving the convergence rate of gradient-based optimizers that is easy to implement and works well in practice. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in a range of optimization problems by…
In many learning settings, it is beneficial to augment the main features with pairwise interactions. Such interaction models can be often enhanced by performing variable selection under the so-called strong hierarchy constraint: an…
Bilevel Optimization has experienced significant advancements recently with the introduction of new efficient algorithms. Mirroring the success in single-level optimization, stochastic gradient-based algorithms are widely used in bilevel…
Gradient boosting is a state-of-the-art prediction technique that sequentially produces a model in the form of linear combinations of simple predictors---typically decision trees---by solving an infinite-dimensional convex optimization…
We study a distributed framework for stochastic optimization which is inspired by models of collective motion found in nature (e.g., swarming) with mild communication requirements. Specifically, we analyze a scheme in which each one of $N >…
We focus on the optimization problem with smooth, possibly nonconvex objectives and a convex constraint set for which the Euclidean projection operation is practically available. Focusing on this setting, we carry out a general convergence…
We demonstrate an equivalence between reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) embeddings of conditional distributions and vector-valued regressors. This connection introduces a natural regularized loss function which the RKHS embeddings…