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This paper introduces an iterative algorithm for training nonparametric additive models that enjoys favorable memory storage and computational requirements. The algorithm can be viewed as the functional counterpart of stochastic gradient…
In this paper, we propose a new stochastic column-block gradient descent method for solving nonlinear systems of equations. It has a descent direction and holds an approximately optimal step size obtained through an optimization problem. We…
Stochastic dynamical systems are ubiquitous in physics, biology, and engineering, where both deterministic drifts and random fluctuations govern system behavior. Learning these dynamics from data is particularly challenging in…
Gradient-based methods successfully train highly overparameterized models in practice, even though the associated optimization problems are markedly nonconvex. Understanding the mechanisms that make such methods effective has become a…
Recommender systems need to mirror the complexity of the environment they are applied in. The more we know about what might benefit the user, the more objectives the recommender system has. In addition there may be multiple stakeholders -…
Driven by the need to solve increasingly complex optimization problems in signal processing and machine learning, there has been increasing interest in understanding the behavior of gradient-descent algorithms in non-convex environments.…
We study the problem of system identification for stochastic continuous-time dynamics, based on a single finite-length state trajectory. We present a method for estimating the possibly unstable open-loop matrix by employing properly…
Unsupervised learning aims at the discovery of hidden structure that drives the observations in the real world. It is essential for success in modern machine learning. Latent variable models are versatile in unsupervised learning and have…
We systematically develop a learning-based treatment of stochastic optimal control (SOC), relying on direct optimization of parametric control policies. We propose a derivation of adjoint sensitivity results for stochastic differential…
Interpreting gradient methods as fixed-point iterations, we provide a detailed analysis of those methods for minimizing convex objective functions. Due to their conceptual and algorithmic simplicity, gradient methods are widely used in…
Differentiable simulation is a promising toolkit for fast gradient-based policy optimization and system identification. However, existing approaches to differentiable simulation have largely tackled scenarios where obtaining smooth…
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Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…
Gradient descent is one of the most widely used iterative algorithms in modern statistical learning. However, its precise algorithmic dynamics in high-dimensional settings remain only partially understood, which has limited its broader…
The representation of functions by artificial neural networks depends on a large number of parameters in a non-linear fashion. Suitable parameters of these are found by minimizing a 'loss functional', typically by stochastic gradient…
This article suggests that deterministic Gradient Descent, which does not use any stochastic gradient approximation, can still exhibit stochastic behaviors. In particular, it shows that if the objective function exhibit multiscale…
We perform an experimental study of the dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in learning deep neural networks for several real and synthetic classification tasks. We show that in the initial epochs, almost all of the performance…
The superior performance of ensemble methods with infinite models are well known. Most of these methods are based on optimization problems in infinite-dimensional spaces with some regularization, for instance, boosting methods and convex…
Gradient descent is a popular algorithm in optimization, and its performance in convex settings is mostly well understood. In non-convex settings, it has been shown that gradient descent is able to escape saddle points asymptotically and…