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Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) are one of the most potent parametric density models used extensively in many applications. Flexibly-tied factorization of the covariance matrices in GMMs is a powerful approach for coping with the challenges…

Black-box optimization is a very active area of research, with many new algorithms being developed every year. This variety is needed, on the one hand, since different algorithms are most suitable for different types of optimization…

The Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) is one of the most successful examples of a derandomized evolution strategy. However, it still relies on randomly sampling offspring, which can be done via a uniform distribution…

The limited memory steepest descent method (Fletcher, 2012) for unconstrained optimization problems stores a few past gradients to compute multiple stepsizes at once. We review this method and propose new variants. For strictly convex…

The machine learning community has witnessed impressive advancements since large language models (LLMs) first appeared. Yet, their massive memory consumption has become a significant roadblock to large-scale training. For instance, a 7B…

A framework based on iterative coordinate minimization (CM) is developed for stochastic convex optimization. Given that exact coordinate minimization is impossible due to the unknown stochastic nature of the objective function, the crux of…

Convolutional dictionary learning (CDL or sparsifying CDL) has many applications in image processing and computer vision. There has been growing interest in developing efficient algorithms for CDL, mostly relying on the augmented Lagrangian…

Update formulas for the Hessian approximations in quasi-Newton methods such as BFGS can be derived as analytical solutions to certain nearest-matrix problems. In this article, we propose a similar idea for deriving new limited memory…

Data-efficient learning aims to eliminate redundancy in large training datasets by training models on smaller subsets of the most informative examples. While data selection has been extensively explored for vision models and large language…

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a model-based approach to sequentially optimize expensive black-box functions, such as the validation error of a deep neural network with respect to its hyperparameters. In many real-world scenarios, the…

Large language model (LLM) generation often requires balancing output quality against inference cost, especially when using multiple generations. We introduce a new framework for inference-time optimization based on the classical Pandora's…

We consider the problem of computing a Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution of a parameter given a large number N of observations and a Gaussian prior, when the dimension of the parameter d is also large. To address this…

This paper deals with the identification of linear stochastic dynamical systems, where the unknowns include system coefficients and noise variances. Conventional approaches that rely on the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) require…

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become the default approach to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) due to its significant reduction in trainable parameters. However, trainable parameter demand for LoRA increases with increasing model…

In this paper, we study nonconvex constrained stochastic zeroth-order optimization problems, for which we have access to exact information of constraints and noisy function values of the objective. We propose a Bregman linearized augmented…

In this paper, we study the problem of constrained robust (min-max) optimization ina black-box setting, where the desired optimizer cannot access the gradients of the objective function but may query its values. We present a principled…

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) has been a powerful framework for solving black-box problems, which estimates gradients using zeroth-order data to update variables iteratively. The practical applicability of ZO critically depends on the…

In this paper, we consider a class of nonconvex (not necessarily differentiable) optimization problems called generalized DC (Difference-of-Convex functions) programming, which is minimizing the sum of two separable DC parts and one…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved strong performance on vision-language tasks, particularly Visual Question Answering (VQA). While prior work has explored unimodal biases in VQA, the problem of selection bias in…

We introduce a new algorithm to solve a regularized spatial-spectral image estimation problem. Our approach is based on the linearized alternating directions method of multipliers (LADMM), which is a variation of the popular ADMM algorithm.…