Related papers: Faster Stochastic Variational Inference using Prox…
We study computational and statistical consequences of problem geometry in stochastic and online optimization. By focusing on constraint set and gradient geometry, we characterize the problem families for which stochastic- and…
Gradient clipping is commonly used in training deep neural networks partly due to its practicability in relieving the exploding gradient problem. Recently, \citet{zhang2019gradient} show that clipped (stochastic) Gradient Descent (GD)…
We define a stochastic variant of the proximal point algorithm in the general setting of nonlinear (separable) Hadamard spaces for approximating zeros of the mean of a stochastically perturbed monotone vector field and prove its convergence…
We propose an approach to construction of robust non-Euclidean iterative algorithms for convex composite stochastic optimization based on truncation of stochastic gradients. For such algorithms, we establish sub-Gaussian confidence bounds…
Stochastic approximation techniques have been used in various contexts in data science. We propose a stochastic version of the forward-backward algorithm for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is not necessarily…
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…
In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…
This paper introduces the $f$-divergence variational inference ($f$-VI) that generalizes variational inference to all $f$-divergences. Initiated from minimizing a crafty surrogate $f$-divergence that shares the statistical consistency with…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…
In this paper, we investigate the theoretical properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for statistical inference in the context of nonconvex optimization problems, which have been relatively unexplored compared to convex settings.…
Fractional derivatives are a well-studied generalization of integer order derivatives. Naturally, for optimization, it is of interest to understand the convergence properties of gradient descent using fractional derivatives. Convergence…
Online and stochastic gradient methods have emerged as potent tools in large scale optimization with both smooth convex and nonsmooth convex problems from the classes $C^{1,1}(\reals^p)$ and $C^{1,0}(\reals^p)$ respectively. However to our…
Variance reduction (VR) methods employ stochastic gradients with decreasing variance, and they have been widely applied to solve large-scale optimization problems in machine learning because of their efficiency. Existing theoretical studies…
This paper revisits the convergence of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) in the contemporary nonconvex optimization setting. Existing results for batch-free nonconvex SMD restrict the choice of the distance generating function (DGF) to be…
An efficient proximal-gradient-based method, called proximal extrapolated gradient method, is designed for solving monotone variational inequality in Hilbert space. The proposed method extends the acceptable range of parameters to obtain…
We consider the problem of learning a Gaussian variational approximation to the posterior distribution for a high-dimensional parameter, where we impose sparsity in the precision matrix to reflect appropriate conditional independence…
Stochastic variational inference makes it possible to approximate posterior distributions induced by large datasets quickly using stochastic optimization. The algorithm relies on the use of fully factorized variational distributions.…
We present a Bayesian non-parametric way of inferring stochastic differential equations for both regression tasks and continuous-time dynamical modelling. The work has high emphasis on the stochastic part of the differential equation, also…
Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to…
We develop a new proximal-gradient method for minimizing the sum of a differentiable, possibly nonconvex, function plus a convex, possibly non differentiable, function. The key features of the proposed method are the definition of a…