Related papers: New insights and perspectives on the natural gradi…
We propose efficient numerical schemes for implementing the natural gradient descent (NGD) for a broad range of metric spaces with applications to PDE-based optimization problems. Our technique represents the natural gradient direction as a…
In this work, we develop new optimization algorithms that use approximate second-order information combined with the gradient regularization technique to achieve fast global convergence rates for both convex and non-convex objectives. The…
This paper studies large-scale optimization problems on Riemannian manifolds whose objective function is a finite sum of negative log-probability losses. Such problems arise in various machine learning and signal processing applications. By…
The natural gradient method is widely used in statistical optimization, but its standard formulation assumes a Euclidean parameter space. This paper proposes an inversion-free stochastic natural gradient method for probability distributions…
In optimization, the natural gradient method is well-known for likelihood maximization. The method uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence, corresponding infinitesimally to the Fisher-Rao metric, which is pulled back to the parameter space of…
Fisher information and natural gradient provided deep insights and powerful tools to artificial neural networks. However related analysis becomes more and more difficult as the learner's structure turns large and complex. This paper makes a…
We evaluate natural gradient, an algorithm originally proposed in Amari (1997), for learning deep models. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We show the connection between natural gradient and three other recently proposed…
Bayesian inference plays an important role in advancing machine learning, but faces computational challenges when applied to complex models such as deep neural networks. Variational inference circumvents these challenges by formulating…
Differentially private (stochastic) gradient descent is the workhorse of DP private machine learning in both the convex and non-convex settings. Without privacy constraints, second-order methods, like Newton's method, converge faster than…
The recently proposed option-critic architecture Bacon et al. provide a stochastic policy gradient approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning. Specifically, they provide a way to estimate the gradient of the expected discounted return…
Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…
In this paper, we try to uncover the second-order essence of several first-order optimization methods. For Nesterov Accelerated Gradient, we rigorously prove that the algorithm makes use of the difference between past and current gradients,…
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…
Gradient-based algorithms are one of the methods of choice for the optimisation of Markov Decision Processes. In this article we will present a novel approximate Newton algorithm for the optimisation of such models. The algorithm has…
We study online inference and asymptotic covariance estimation for the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. While classical methods (such as plug-in and batch-means estimators) are available, they either require inaccessible…
We present a new class of gradient-type optimization methods that extends vanilla gradient descent, mirror descent, Riemannian gradient descent, and natural gradient descent. Our approach involves constructing a surrogate for the objective…
Natural gradients have been widely used in optimization of loss functionals over probability space, with important examples such as Fisher-Rao gradient descent for Kullback-Leibler divergence, Wasserstein gradient descent for…
This report investigates the fitting of the Hessian or its inverse for stochastic optimizations using a Hessian fitting criterion derived from the preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (PSGD) method. This criterion is closely related…
We consider the problem of approximating a function by an element of a nonlinear manifold which admits a differentiable parametrization, typical examples being neural networks with differentiable activation functions or tensor networks.…
This paper introduces a method for efficiently approximating the inverse of the Fisher information matrix, a crucial step in achieving effective variational Bayes inference. A notable aspect of our approach is the avoidance of analytically…