Related papers: A Convex Surrogate Operator for General Non-Modula…
In this work we provide a theoretical framework for structured prediction that generalizes the existing theory of surrogate methods for binary and multiclass classification based on estimating conditional probabilities with smooth convex…
Optimization problems with nonlinear cost functions and combinatorial constraints appear in many real-world applications but remain challenging to solve efficiently compared to their linear counterparts. To bridge this gap, we propose…
This paper is concerned with the approximation of continuously differentiable functions with high-dimensional input by a composition of two functions: a feature map that extracts few features from the input space, and a profile function…
Stochastic majorization-minimization (SMM) is a class of stochastic optimization algorithms that proceed by sampling new data points and minimizing a recursive average of surrogate functions of an objective function. The surrogates are…
Submodular continuous functions are a category of (generally) non-convex/non-concave functions with a wide spectrum of applications. We characterize these functions and demonstrate that they can be maximized efficiently with approximation…
Given a prediction task, understanding when one can and cannot design a consistent convex surrogate loss, particularly a low-dimensional one, is an important and active area of machine learning research. The prediction task may be given as…
To address the uncertainty in function types, recent progress in online convex optimization (OCO) has spurred the development of universal algorithms that simultaneously attain minimax rates for multiple types of convex functions. However,…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has played a central role in machine learning. However, it requires a carefully hand-picked stepsize for fast convergence, which is notoriously tedious and time-consuming to tune. Over the last several…
In multiclass classification over $n$ outcomes, the outcomes must be embedded into the reals with dimension at least $n-1$ in order to design a consistent surrogate loss that leads to the "correct" classification, regardless of the data…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function so that along the iterations the objective function decreases. Such a simple principle allows to solve a large…
Sparse methods for supervised learning aim at finding good linear predictors from as few variables as possible, i.e., with small cardinality of their supports. This combinatorial selection problem is often turned into a convex optimization…
Deep learning has proven to be effective in a wide variety of loss minimization problems. However, many applications of interest, like minimizing projected Bellman error and min-max optimization, cannot be modelled as minimizing a scalar…
We study consistency properties of machine learning methods based on minimizing convex surrogates. We extend the recent framework of Osokin et al. (2017) for the quantitative analysis of consistency properties to the case of inconsistent…
Convection-dominated problems are known for their slow Kolmogorov $n$-width decays and are challenging for model order reduction (MOR). In this work, we propose a hybrid surrogate modeling approach and a non-intrusive variant that overcome…
The development of a reliable and robust surrogate model is often constrained by the dimensionality of the problem. For a system with high-dimensional inputs/outputs (I/O), conventional approaches usually use a low-dimensional manifold to…
Submodular functions are relevant to machine learning for at least two reasons: (1) some problems may be expressed directly as the optimization of submodular functions and (2) the lovasz extension of submodular functions provides a useful…
We study the safe reinforcement learning problem with nonlinear function approximation, where policy optimization is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with both the objective and the constraint being nonconvex functions. For…
Adversarially robust classification seeks a classifier that is insensitive to adversarial perturbations of test patterns. This problem is often formulated via a minimax objective, where the target loss is the worst-case value of the 0-1…
We introduce a new surrogate loss function called orbit loss in the structured prediction framework, which has good theoretical and practical advantages. While the orbit loss is not convex, it has a simple analytical gradient and a simple…
We consider the minimization of submodular functions subject to ordering constraints. We show that this optimization problem can be cast as a convex optimization problem on a space of uni-dimensional measures, with ordering constraints…