Related papers: Analysis of a Natural Gradient Algorithm on Monoto…
The performance of evolutionary algorithms can be heavily undermined when constraints limit the feasible areas of the search space. For instance, while Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy is one of the most efficient algorithms…
In this paper, we propose a stochastic optimization method that adaptively controls the sample size used in the computation of gradient approximations. Unlike other variance reduction techniques that either require additional storage or the…
We introduce Kalman Gradient Descent, a stochastic optimization algorithm that uses Kalman filtering to adaptively reduce gradient variance in stochastic gradient descent by filtering the gradient estimates. We present both a theoretical…
Stochastic gradient algorithms have been the main focus of large-scale learning problems and they led to important successes in machine learning. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of learning rate and the amount of the…
An appealing property of the natural gradient is that it is invariant to arbitrary differentiable reparameterizations of the model. However, this invariance property requires infinitesimal steps and is lost in practical implementations with…
We introduce a doubly stochastic proximal gradient algorithm for optimizing a finite average of smooth convex functions, whose gradients depend on numerically expensive expectations. Our main motivation is the acceleration of the…
Evolution strategy (ES) has been shown great promise in many challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, rivaling other state-of-the-art deep RL methods. Yet, there are two limitations in the current ES practice that may hinder its…
Gaussian graphical models (GGMs) are widely used to recover the conditional independence structure among random variables. Recent work has sought to incorporate auxiliary covariates to improve estimation, particularly in applications such…
The L1-regularized Gaussian maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) has been shown to have strong statistical guarantees in recovering a sparse inverse covariance matrix, or alternatively the underlying graph structure of a Gaussian Markov…
We propose a simple algorithm to train stochastic neural networks to draw samples from given target distributions for probabilistic inference. Our method is based on iteratively adjusting the neural network parameters so that the output…
We propose a generic framework based on a new stochastic variance-reduced gradient descent algorithm for accelerating nonconvex low-rank matrix recovery. Starting from an appropriate initial estimator, our proposed algorithm performs…
In this paper, we develop a symmetric accelerated stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (SAS-ADMM) for solving separable convex optimization problems with linear constraints. The objective function is the sum of a possibly…
The rise of deep learning in recent years has brought with it increasingly clever optimization methods to deal with complex, non-linear loss functions. These methods are often designed with convex optimization in mind, but have been shown…
Many global optimization algorithms of the memetic variety rely on some form of stochastic search, and yet they often lack a sound probabilistic basis. Without a recourse to the powerful tools of stochastic calculus, treading the fine…
In this paper, we propose new structured second-order methods and structured adaptive-gradient methods obtained by performing natural-gradient descent on structured parameter spaces. Natural-gradient descent is an attractive approach to…
We consider optimization problems in which the goal is find a $k$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{R}^n$, $k<<n$, which minimizes a convex and smooth loss. Such problems generalize the fundamental task of principal component analysis (PCA)…
There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…
Natural policy gradient (NPG) and its variants are widely-used policy search methods in reinforcement learning. Inspired by prior work, a new NPG variant coined NPG-HM is developed in this paper, which utilizes the Hessian-aided momentum…
In this paper, we consider supervised learning problems such as logistic regression and study the stochastic gradient method with averaging, in the usual stochastic approximation setting where observations are used only once. We show that…
In this paper we propose a unified two-phase scheme for convex optimization to accelerate: (1) the adaptive cubic regularization methods with exact/inexact Hessian matrices, and (2) the adaptive gradient method, without any knowledge of the…