Related papers: Stein Unbiased GrAdient estimator of the Risk (SUG…
We derive finite-particle rates for the regularized Stein variational gradient descent (R-SVGD) algorithm introduced by He et al. (2024) that corrects the constant-order bias of the SVGD by applying a resolvent-type preconditioner to the…
We consider quasi-admissibility/inadmissibility of Stein-type shrinkage estimators of the mean of a multivariate normal distribution with covariance matrix an unknown multiple of the identity. Quasi-admissibility/inadmissibility is defined…
This paper addresses risk averse constrained optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions can only be computed by a blackbox subject to unknown uncertainties. To handle mixed aleatory/epistemic uncertainties, the…
Given functional data from a survival process with time-dependent covariates, we derive a smooth convex representation for its nonparametric log-likelihood functional and obtain its functional gradient. From this, we devise a generic…
Policy-gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning, yet training often becomes unstable or slows down as learning progresses. We study this phenomenon through the noise-to-signal ratio (NSR) of a policy-gradient estimator,…
Stochastic mirror descent (SMD) is a fairly new family of algorithms that has recently found a wide range of applications in optimization, machine learning, and control. It can be considered a generalization of the classical stochastic…
This paper proposes methods for producing compound selection decisions in a Gaussian sequence model. Given unknown, fixed parameters $\mu_ {1:n}$ and known $\sigma_{1:n}$ with observations $Y_i \sim \textsf{N}(\mu_i, \sigma_i^2)$, the…
We introduce Stochastic Asymptotical Regularization (SAR) methods for the uncertainty quantification of the stable approximate solution of ill-posed linear-operator equations, which are deterministic models for numerous inverse problems in…
A new strategy for fair supervised machine learning is proposed. The main advantages of the proposed strategy as compared to others in the literature are as follows. (a) We introduce a new smooth nonconvex surrogate to approximate the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…
We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…
This paper presents a novel stochastic gradient descent algorithm for constrained optimization. The proposed algorithm randomly samples constraints and components of the finite sum objective function and relies on a relaxed logarithmic…
Aerodynamic optimization is ubiquitous in the design of most engineering systems interacting with fluids. A common approach is to optimize a performance function defined by a choice of an aerodynamic model, e.g., turbulence RANS model, and…
We deal with the problem of gradient estimation for stochastic differentiable relaxations of algorithms, operators, simulators, and other non-differentiable functions. Stochastic smoothing conventionally perturbs the input of a…
Gradient Descent (GD) and Conjugate Gradient (CG) methods are among the most effective iterative algorithms for solving unconstrained optimization problems, particularly in machine learning and statistical modeling, where they are employed…
We introduce Multi-Iteration Stochastic Optimizers, a novel class of first-order stochastic methods that control the relative $L^2$ error using successive control variates along the iteration path. By exploiting correlations between…
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 study finite-sum non-convex optimization $\min_{x\in\mathbb{R}^d} F(x) \;=\; \frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^n f_i(x)$ and analyze a variance-reduced cubic Newton method based on EMA-smoothed SARAH estimators for both gradient and Hessian…
Several emerging post-Bayesian methods target a probability distribution for which an entropy-regularised variational objective is minimised. This increased flexibility introduces a computational challenge, as one loses access to an…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is an important alternative to the Langevin-type algorithms for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi(x) \propto \exp(-V(x))$. In the existing theory of Langevin-type algorithms…