Related papers: Fast Second-Order Stochastic Backpropagation for V…
In stochastic optimization problems using noisy zeroth-order (ZO) oracles only, the randomized counterpart of the Kiefer-Wolfowitz-type method is widely used to estimate the gradient. Existing algorithms generate randomized perturbation…
Covariance estimation and selection for multivariate datasets in a high-dimensional regime is a fundamental problem in modern statistics. Gaussian graphical models are a popular class of models used for this purpose. Current Bayesian…
Variational Optimization forms a differentiable upper bound on an objective. We show that approaches such as Natural Evolution Strategies and Gaussian Perturbation, are special cases of Variational Optimization in which the expectations are…
Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…
Mean-field variational inference is a method for approximate Bayesian posterior inference. It approximates a full posterior distribution with a factorized set of distributions by maximizing a lower bound on the marginal likelihood. This…
We present Quantized Variational Inference, a new algorithm for Evidence Lower Bound maximization. We show how Optimal Voronoi Tesselation produces variance free gradients for ELBO optimization at the cost of introducing asymptotically…
We develop two novel stochastic variance-reduction methods to approximate solutions of a class of nonmonotone [generalized] equations. Our algorithms leverage a new combination of ideas from the forward-reflected-backward splitting method…
Training in supervised deep learning is computationally demanding, and the convergence behavior is usually not fully understood. We introduce and study a second-order stochastic quasi-Gauss-Newton (SQGN) optimization method that combines…
We consider stochastic zeroth-order optimization over Riemannian submanifolds embedded in Euclidean space, where the task is to solve Riemannian optimization problem with only noisy objective function evaluations. Towards this, our main…
We study stochastic zeroth order gradient and Hessian estimators for real-valued functions in $\mathbb{R}^n$. We show that, via taking finite difference along random orthogonal directions, the variance of the stochastic finite difference…
A new method called "variational sampling" is proposed to estimate integrals under probability distributions that can be evaluated up to a normalizing constant. The key idea is to fit the target distribution with an exponential family model…
We study stochastic zeroth-order optimization with decision-dependent distributions, where the sampling law depends on the current decision and only noisy function values are available. For the non-smooth non-convex setting, we establish an…
Bayesian inference typically relies on specifying a parametric model that approximates the data-generating process. However, misspecified models can yield poor convergence rates and unreliable posterior calibration. Bayesian empirical…
First-order stochastic methods are the state-of-the-art in large-scale machine learning optimization owing to efficient per-iteration complexity. Second-order methods, while able to provide faster convergence, have been much less explored…
Second-order optimization methods exhibit fast convergence to critical points, however, in nonconvex optimization, these methods often require restrictive step-sizes to ensure a monotonically decreasing objective function. In the presence…
We develop Policy Gradient with Second-Order Momentum (PG-SOM), a lightweight second-order optimisation scheme for reinforcement-learning policies. PG-SOM augments the classical REINFORCE update with two exponentially weighted statistics: a…
While stochastic variational inference is relatively well known for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models, related methods also offer ways to circumnavigate the approximation of analytically intractable expectations. The key…
This paper introduces two variational inference approaches for infinite-dimensional inverse problems, developed through gradient descent with a constant learning rate. The proposed methods enable efficient approximate sampling from the…
The optimal value function is one of the basic objects in the field of mathematical optimization, as it allows the evaluation of the variations in the cost/revenue generated while minimizing/maximizing a given function under some…
Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…