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We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…
Several convex formulation methods have been proposed previously for statistical estimation with structured sparsity as the prior. These methods often require a carefully tuned regularization parameter, often a cumbersome or heuristic…
We consider the problem of estimating the expected value of information (the knowledge gradient) for Bayesian learning problems where the belief model is nonlinear in the parameters. Our goal is to maximize some metric, while simultaneously…
Stochastic-gradient-based optimization has been a core enabling methodology in applications to large-scale problems in machine learning and related areas. Despite the progress, the gap between theory and practice remains significant, with…
The slowing down of Moore's law has driven the development of unconventional computing paradigms, such as specialized Ising machines tailored to solve combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we show a new application domain for…
Stochastic gradient descent method and its variants constitute the core optimization algorithms that achieve good convergence rates for solving machine learning problems. These rates are obtained especially when these algorithms are…
Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…
We develop and analyze stochastic optimization algorithms for problems in which the expected loss is strongly convex, and the optimum is (approximately) sparse. Previous approaches are able to exploit only one of these two structures,…
The Lasso is one of the most important approaches for parameter estimation and variable selection in high dimensional linear regression. At the heart of its success is the attractive rate of convergence result even when $p$, the dimension…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
Recent work has established an empirically successful framework for adapting learning rates for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). This effectively removes all needs for tuning, while automatically reducing learning rates over time on…
The convergence of expectation-maximization (EM)-based algorithms typically requires continuity of the likelihood function with respect to all the unknown parameters (optimization variables). The requirement is not met when parameters…
We consider stochastic approximations which arise from such applications as data communications and image processing. We demonstrate why constraints are needed in a stochastic approximation and how a constrained approximation can be…
Stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints have a broad range of applications in intelligent transportation, cyber-security, and smart grids. In this paper, first, we propose an inexact-proximal accelerated…
We give the first efficient algorithm for learning the structure of an Ising model that tolerates independent failures; that is, each entry of the observed sample is missing with some unknown probability p. Our algorithm matches the…
We propose a new stochastic L-BFGS algorithm and prove a linear convergence rate for strongly convex and smooth functions. Our algorithm draws heavily from a recent stochastic variant of L-BFGS proposed in Byrd et al. (2014) as well as a…
Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular and efficient algorithm for Bayesian inference. Despite empirical success, the convergence of this method is still not fully understood. In this work, we define and study…
The Robbins-Monro stochastic approximation algorithm is a foundation of many algorithmic frameworks for reinforcement learning (RL), and often an efficient approach to solving (or approximating the solution to) complex optimal control…
Consider convex optimization problems subject to a large number of constraints. We focus on stochastic problems in which the objective takes the form of expected values and the feasible set is the intersection of a large number of convex…
Backpropagation with gradient descent is a common optimization strategy employed by most neural network architectures in machine learning. However, finding optimal hyperparameters to guide training has proven challenging. While it is widely…