Related papers: Stein Variational Adaptive Importance Sampling
Deep neural network training spends most of the computation on examples that are properly handled, and could be ignored. We propose to mitigate this phenomenon with a principled importance sampling scheme that focuses computation on…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most important single algorithm in modern machine learning. Although SGD with unbiased gradient estimators has been studied extensively over at least half a century, SGD variants relying on…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular particle-based method for Bayesian inference. However, its convergence suffers from the variance collapse, which reduces the accuracy and diversity of the estimation. In this paper, we…
Distributed Stein Variational Gradient Descent (DSVGD) is a non-parametric distributed learning framework for federated Bayesian learning, where multiple clients jointly train a machine learning model by communicating a number of non-random…
Importance Sampling (IS) is a widely used variance reduction technique for enhancing the efficiency of Monte Carlo methods, particularly in rare-event simulation and related applications. Despite its effectiveness, the performance of IS is…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…
Machine learning optimization often depends on stochastic gradient descent, where the precision of gradient estimation is vital for model performance. Gradients are calculated from mini-batches formed by uniformly selecting data samples…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable distributions and integrals with respect to them. The origin of IS dates from the early 1950s. In the last decades, the rise of the Bayesian paradigm…
Stochastic variational inference algorithms are derived for fitting various heteroskedastic time series models. We examine Gaussian, t, and skew-t response GARCH models and fit these using Gaussian variational approximating densities. We…
We propose a unifying view of two different Bayesian inference algorithms, Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) and Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), leading to improved and efficient novel sampling schemes. We…
Reducing the variance of the gradient estimator is known to improve the convergence rate of stochastic gradient-based optimization and sampling algorithms. One way of achieving variance reduction is to design importance sampling strategies.…
We introduce a doubly stochastic proximal gradient algorithm for optimizing a finite average of smooth convex functions, whose gradients depend on numerically expensive expectations. Our main motivation is the acceleration of the…
Stochastic mirror descent (SMD) is a fairly new family of algorithms that has recently found a wide range of applications in optimization, machine learning, and control. It can be considered a generalization of the classical stochastic…
Deep neural networks (DNN) are typically optimized using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the estimation of the gradient using stochastic samples tends to be noisy and unreliable, resulting in large gradient variance and bad…
We develop Riemannian Stein Variational Gradient Descent (RSVGD), a Bayesian inference method that generalizes Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to Riemann manifold. The benefits are two-folds: (i) for inference tasks in Euclidean…
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…
Policy gradient methods have been successfully applied to many complex reinforcement learning problems. However, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance, slow convergence, and inefficient exploration. In this work, we introduce a…
We analyze a batched variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with weighted sampling distribution for smooth and non-smooth objective functions. We show that by distributing the batches computationally, a significant speedup in the…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…