Related papers: Constrained and Preconditioned Stochastic Gradient…
We introduce a perturbed preconditioned gradient descent (PPGD) method for the unconstrained minimization of a strongly convex objective $G$ with a locally Lipschitz continuous gradient. We assume that $G(v)=E(v)+F(v)$ and that the gradient…
Many applications in machine learning or signal processing involve nonsmooth optimization problems. This nonsmoothness brings a low-dimensional structure to the optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a randomized proximal gradient…
We prove convergence of the proximal policy gradient method for a class of constrained stochastic control problems with control in both the drift and diffusion of the state process. The problem requires either the running or terminal cost…
We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…
This paper studies the performance of a recently proposed preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (PSGD) algorithm on recurrent neural network (RNN) training. PSGD adaptively estimates a preconditioner to accelerate gradient descent, and…
In this paper we propose a wide class of truncated stochastic approximation procedures with moving random bounds. While we believe that the proposed class of procedures will find its way to a wider range of applications, the main motivation…
Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) have been widely used for solving stochastic optimization problems. A majority of existing works assume no constraints or easy-to-project constraints. In this paper, we consider convex stochastic…
We consider solving a convex, possibly stochastic optimization problem over a randomly time-varying multi-agent network. Each agent has access to some local objective function, and it only has unbiased estimates of the gradients of the…
The performance of standard stochastic approximation implementations can vary significantly based on the choice of the steplength sequence, and in general, little guidance is provided about good choices. Motivated by this gap, in the first…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
We present a new algorithm for solving optimization problems with objective functions that are the sum of a smooth function and a (potentially) nonsmooth regularization function, and nonlinear equality constraints. The algorithm may be…
We consider a wide range of regularized stochastic minimization problems with two regularization terms, one of which is composed with a linear function. This optimization model abstracts a number of important applications in artificial…
We develop a stochastic algorithm for independent component analysis that incorporates multi-trial supervision, which is available in many scientific contexts. The method blends a proximal gradient-type algorithm in the space of invertible…
We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…
We consider the problem of learning a conditional Gaussian graphical model in the presence of latent variables. Building on recent advances in this field, we suggest a method that decomposes the parameters of a conditional Markov random…
Several recent works have explored stochastic gradient methods for variational inference that exploit the geometry of the variational-parameter space. However, the theoretical properties of these methods are not well-understood and these…
We focus on analyzing the classical stochastic projected gradient methods under a general dependent data sampling scheme for constrained smooth nonconvex optimization. We show the worst-case rate of convergence $\tilde{O}(t^{-1/4})$ and…
In this paper, we revisit the large-scale constrained linear regression problem and propose faster methods based on some recent developments in sketching and optimization. Our algorithms combine (accelerated) mini-batch SGD with a new…
The performance of optimization methods is often tied to the spectrum of the objective Hessian. Yet, conventional assumptions, such as smoothness, do often not enable us to make finely-grained convergence statements -- particularly not for…
In this paper, we study the problem of \textit{constrained} and \textit{stochastic} continuous submodular maximization. Even though the objective function is not concave (nor convex) and is defined in terms of an expectation, we develop a…