Related papers: Stochastic Gradient Descent as Approximate Bayesia…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a prominent particle-based variational inference method used for sampling a target distribution. SVGD has attracted interest for application in machine-learning techniques such as Bayesian…
We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…
We study the learning dynamics of a multi-pass, mini-batch Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) procedure for empirical risk minimization in high-dimensional multi-index models with isotropic random data. In an asymptotic regime where the…
In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…
We develop a new method of online inference for a vector of parameters estimated by the Polyak-Ruppert averaging procedure of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms. We leverage insights from time series regression in econometrics and…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been the method of choice for learning large-scale non-convex models. While a general analysis of when SGD works has been elusive, there has been a lot of recent progress in understanding the…
This paper studies distributed nonconvex optimization problems with stochastic gradients for a multi-agent system, in which each agent aims to minimize the sum of all agents' cost functions by using local compressed information exchange. We…
Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) methods have become fundamental optimization tools in machine learning, combining the computational efficiency of stochastic gradients with the acceleration benefits of momentum. Despite…
Bayesian computation plays an important role in modern machine learning and statistics to reason about uncertainty. A key computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to develop efficient techniques to approximate, or draw samples from…
We show that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) escapes from sharp minima exponentially fast even before SGD reaches stationary distribution. SGD has been a de-facto standard training algorithm for various machine learning tasks. However,…
Stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) and stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (SGHMC) are two popular Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for Bayesian inference that can scale to large datasets, allowing to sample from…
Stochastic optimization lies at the core of most statistical learning models. The recent great development of stochastic algorithmic tools focused significantly onto proximal gradient iterations, in order to find an efficient approach for…
As an important Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) algorithm has achieved great success in Bayesian learning and posterior sampling. However, SGLD typically suffers from slow convergence…
We present a convergence rate analysis for biased stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where individual gradient updates are corrupted by computation errors. We develop stochastic quadratic constraints to formulate a small linear matrix…
In this work we consider stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for solving linear inverse problems in Banach spaces. SGD and its variants have been established as one of the most successful optimisation methods in machine learning, imaging and…
A central challenge in Bayesian inference is efficiently approximating posterior distributions. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular variational inference method which transports a set of particles to approximate a target…
Gradient-based approximate inference methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), provide simple and general-purpose inference engines for differentiable continuous distributions. However, existing forms of SVGD cannot be…
Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…
Machine learning has made tremendous progress in recent years, with models matching or even surpassing humans on a series of specialized tasks. One key element behind the progress of machine learning in recent years has been the ability to…