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This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of a broad range of variations of the stochastic proximal point method (SPPM). Proximal point methods have attracted considerable interest owing to their numerical stability and robustness…
We analyze the optimization landscape of a recently introduced tunable class of loss functions called $\alpha$-loss, $\alpha \in (0,\infty]$, in the logistic model. This family encapsulates the exponential loss ($\alpha = 1/2$), the…
Likelihood-free methods are an essential tool for performing inference for implicit models which can be simulated from, but for which the corresponding likelihood is intractable. However, common likelihood-free methods do not scale well to…
We present a novel approach to learn a kernel-based regression function. It is based on the useof conical combinations of data-based parameterized kernels and on a new stochastic convex optimization procedure of which we establish…
Minimizing a convex risk function is the main step in many basic learning algorithms. We study protocols for convex optimization which provably leak very little about the individual data points that constitute the loss function.…
This paper introduces a new framework for data efficient and versatile learning. Specifically: 1) We develop ML-PIP, a general framework for Meta-Learning approximate Probabilistic Inference for Prediction. ML-PIP extends existing…
Global optimization of black-box functions from noisy samples is a fundamental challenge in machine learning and scientific computing. Traditional methods such as Bayesian Optimization often converge to local minima on multi-modal…
Integrating natural language (NL) prompts into robotic mission planning has attracted significant interest in recent years. In the construction domain, Building Information Models (BIM) encapsulate rich NL descriptions of the environment.…
Learning-to-optimize leverages machine learning to accelerate optimization algorithms. While empirical results show tremendous improvements compared to classical optimization algorithms, theoretical guarantees are mostly lacking, such that…
We introduce novel variants of momentum by incorporating the variance of the stochastic loss function. The variance characterizes the confidence or uncertainty of the local features of the averaged loss surface across the i.i.d. subsets of…
In this paper, we theoretically justify an approach popular among participants of the Higgs Boson Machine Learning Challenge to optimize approximate median significance (AMS). The approach is based on the following two-stage procedure.…
We introduce a novel combination of Bayesian Models (BMs) and Neural Networks (NNs) for making predictions with a minimum expected risk. Our approach combines the best of both worlds, the data efficiency and interpretability of a BM with…
We develop the first active learning method for contextual linear optimization. Specifically, we introduce a label acquisition algorithm that sequentially decides whether to request the ``labels'' of feature samples from an unlabeled data…
Representation learning has been widely studied in the context of meta-learning, enabling rapid learning of new tasks through shared representations. Recent works such as MAML have explored using fine-tuning-based metrics, which measure the…
There is extensive interest in metric learning methods for image retrieval. Many metric learning loss functions focus on learning a correct ranking of training samples, but strongly overfit semantically inconsistent labels and require a…
Distance/Similarity learning is a fundamental problem in machine learning. For example, kNN classifier or clustering methods are based on a distance/similarity measure. Metric learning algorithms enhance the efficiency of these methods by…
(Partial) ranking loss is a commonly used evaluation measure for multi-label classification, which is usually optimized with convex surrogates for computational efficiency. Prior theoretical work on multi-label ranking mainly focuses on…
This paper studies stochastic minimization of a finite-sum loss $ F (\mathbf{x}) = \frac{1}{N} \sum_{\xi=1}^N f(\mathbf{x};\xi) $. In many real-world scenarios, the Hessian matrix of such objectives exhibits a low-rank structure on a batch…
Supervised learning requires the specification of a loss function to minimise. While the theory of admissible losses from both a computational and statistical perspective is well-developed, these offer a panoply of different choices. In…
We study the problem of optimizing a function under a \emph{budgeted number of evaluations}. We only assume that the function is \emph{locally} smooth around one of its global optima. The difficulty of optimization is measured in terms of…