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We address the challenge of estimating the learning rate for adaptive gradient methods used in training deep neural networks. While several learning-rate-free approaches have been proposed, they are typically tailored for steepest descent.…
We propose to optimize neural networks with a uniformly-distributed random learning rate. The associated stochastic gradient descent algorithm can be approximated by continuous stochastic equations and analyzed within the Fokker-Planck…
Learning to Rank (LTR) algorithms are usually evaluated using Information Retrieval metrics like Normalised Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) or Mean Average Precision. As these metrics rely on sorting predicted items' scores (and thus, on…
This work investigates the training of conditional random fields (CRFs) via the stochastic dual coordinate ascent (SDCA) algorithm of Shalev-Shwartz and Zhang (2016). SDCA enjoys a linear convergence rate and a strong empirical performance…
This paper introduces a novel approach for learning to rank (LETOR) based on the notion of monotone retargeting. It involves minimizing a divergence between all monotonic increasing transformations of the training scores and a parameterized…
Parameter estimation in Markov random fields (MRFs) is a difficult task, in which inference over the network is run in the inner loop of a gradient descent procedure. Replacing exact inference with approximate methods such as loopy belief…
Neural networks are usually trained by some form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD)). A number of strategies are in common use intended to improve SGD optimization, such as learning rate schedules, momentum, and batching. These are…
This paper proposes a novel parameter selection strategy for kernel-based gradient descent (KGD) algorithms, integrating bias-variance analysis with the splitting method. We introduce the concept of empirical effective dimension to quantify…
We present a technique for constructing random fields from a set of training samples. The learning paradigm builds increasingly complex fields by allowing potential functions, or features, that are supported by increasingly large subgraphs.…
Conditional Random Rields (CRF) have been widely applied in image segmentations. While most studies rely on hand-crafted features, we here propose to exploit a pre-trained large convolutional neural network (CNN) to generate deep features…
We study stochastic optimization of nonconvex loss functions, which are typical objectives for training neural networks. We propose stochastic approximation algorithms which optimize a series of regularized, nonlinearized losses on large…
Gradient-based methods for value estimation in reinforcement learning have favorable stability properties, but they are typically much slower than Temporal Difference (TD) learning methods. We study the root causes of this slowness and show…
Iterative methods for fitting a Gaussian Random Field (GRF) model via maximum likelihood (ML) estimation requires solving a nonconvex optimization problem. The problem is aggravated for anisotropic GRFs where the number of covariance…
This paper is concerned with multi-agent optimization problem. A distributed randomized gradient-free mirror descent (DRGFMD) method is developed by introducing a randomized gradient-free oracle in the mirror descent scheme where the…
We consider stochastic gradient methods under the interpolation regime where a perfect fit can be obtained (minimum loss at each observation). While previous work highlighted the implicit regularization of such algorithms, we consider an…
Mean-field variational inference is one of the most popular approaches to inference in discrete random fields. Standard mean-field optimization is based on coordinate descent and in many situations can be impractical. Thus, in practice,…
The proliferation of sensor devices monitoring human activity generates voluminous amount of temporal sequences needing to be interpreted and categorized. Moreover, complex behavior detection requires the personalization of multi-sensor…
We propose EAGLE update rule, a novel optimization method that accelerates loss convergence during the early stages of training by leveraging both current and previous step parameter and gradient values. The update algorithm estimates…
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…
Recently many first and second order variants of SGD have been proposed to facilitate training of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). A common limitation of these works stem from the fact that they use the same learning rate across all instances…