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Raghavendra (STOC 2008) gave an elegant and surprising result: if Khot's Unique Games Conjecture (STOC 2002) is true, then for every constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), the best approximation ratio is attained by a certain simple…
Correlation Clustering (CC) is a fundamental unsupervised learning primitive whose strongest LP-based approximation guarantees require $\Theta(n^3)$ triangle inequality constraints and are prohibitive at scale. We initiate the study of…
Beside the standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, the Adam optimizer due to Kingma & Ba (2014) is currently probably the best-known optimization method for the training of deep neural networks in artificial intelligence (AI)…
Inference is typically intractable in high-treewidth undirected graphical models, making maximum likelihood learning a challenge. One way to overcome this is to restrict parameters to a tractable set, most typically the set of…
A new (unadjusted) Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm with improved rates in total variation and in Wasserstein distance is presented. All these are obtained in the context of sampling from a target distribution $\pi$ that has a density…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence plays a central role in probabilistic machine learning, where it commonly serves as the canonical loss function. Optimization in such settings is often performed over the probability simplex, where the…
Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is an iterative algorithm used to generate samples from a distribution that is known only up to a normalizing constant. The nonasymptotic dependence of its mixing time on the dimension and target accuracy is…
Gradient Temporal Difference (GTD) algorithms (Sutton et al., 2008, 2009) are the first $O(d)$ ($d$ is the number features) algorithms that have convergence guarantees for off-policy learning with linear function approximation. Liu et al.…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…
Similarity-based clustering methods separate data into clusters according to the pairwise similarity between the data, and the pairwise similarity is crucial for their performance. In this paper, we propose {\em Clustering by Discriminative…
Temporal difference learning with linear function approximation is a popular method to obtain a low-dimensional approximation of the value function of a policy in a Markov Decision Process. We give a new interpretation of this method in…
In this paper it is shown that adaptive importance sampling algorithms converge at exponential rate for Markov chain expectation problems that admit a combination of a filtered estimator and a Markov zero-variance measure. It extends a…
We study the worst-case behavior of Block Coordinate Descent (BCD) type algorithms for unconstrained minimization of coordinate-wise smooth convex functions. This behavior is indeed not completely understood, and the practical success of…
We resolve a long-standing open question, about the existence of a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the average-case \textsc{Decision Tree} problem with uniform probability distribution over the hypotheses. We answer the question…
Recent studies have demonstrated that gradient matching-based dataset synthesis, or dataset condensation (DC), methods can achieve state-of-the-art performance when applied to data-efficient learning tasks. However, in this study, we prove…
We study optimization problems that are neither approximable in polynomial time (at least with a constant factor) nor fixed parameter tractable, under widely believed complexity assumptions. Specifically, we focus on Maximum Independent…
This study explores the classification error of Mixture Discriminant Analysis (MDA) in scenarios where the number of mixture components exceeds those present in the actual data distribution, a condition known as overspecification. We use a…
Recent work has suggested using Monte Carlo methods based on piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) to sample from target distributions of interest. PDMPs are non-reversible continuous-time processes endowed with momentum, and…
The Minimum Covariance Determinant (MCD) method is a highly robust estimator of multivariate location and scatter, for which a fast algorithm is available. Since estimating the covariance matrix is the cornerstone of many multivariate…
Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) methods for estimating integrals are attractive since the resulting estimators typically converge at a faster rate than pseudo-random Monte Carlo. However, they can be difficult to set up on arbitrary posterior…