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The probabilistic surrogates used by Bayesian optimizers make them popular methods when function evaluations are noisy or expensive to evaluate. While Bayesian optimizers are traditionally used for global optimization, their benefits are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-14 André L. Marchildon , David W. Zingg

Modern deep learning models generalize remarkably well in-distribution, despite being overparametrized and trained with little to no explicit regularization. Instead, current theory credits implicit regularization imposed by the choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jonathan Wenger , Beau Coker , Juraj Marusic , John P. Cunningham

We propose a new, more general approach to the design of stochastic gradient-based optimization methods for machine learning. In this new framework, optimizers assume access to a batch of gradient estimates per iteration, rather than a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Julius Kunze , James Townsend , David Barber

Derivative Free Optimization is known to be an efficient and robust method to tackle the black-box optimization problem. When it comes to noisy functions, classical comparison-based algorithms are slower than gradient-based algorithms. For…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-04-29 Marie-Liesse Cauwet , Olivier Teytaud

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a workhorse in machine learning, yet its slow convergence can be a computational bottleneck. Variance reduction techniques such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA have been proposed to overcome this weakness,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-29 Thomas Hofmann , Aurelien Lucchi , Simon Lacoste-Julien , Brian McWilliams

Forward gradient learning computes a noisy directional gradient and is a biologically plausible alternative to backprop for learning deep neural networks. However, the standard forward gradient algorithm, when applied naively, suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Mengye Ren , Simon Kornblith , Renjie Liao , Geoffrey Hinton

In the era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ), variational quantum circuits (VQCs) have been widely applied in various domains, demonstrating the potential advantages of quantum circuits over classical models. Similar to classic…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-08-26 Jun Zhuang , Jack Cunningham , Chaowen Guan

Diffusion models have become emerging generative models. Their sampling process involves multiple steps, and in each step the models predict the noise from a noisy sample. When the models make prediction, the output deviates from the ground…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Shifeng Xu , Yanzhu Liu , Adams Wai-Kin Kong

We introduce a family of pairwise stochastic gradient estimators for gradients of expectations, which are related to the log-derivative trick, but involve pairwise interactions between samples. The simplest example of our new estimator,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Christian J. Walder , Paul Roussel , Richard Nock , Cheng Soon Ong , Masashi Sugiyama

In distributed, or privacy-preserving learning, we are often given a set of probabilistic models estimated from different local repositories, and asked to combine them into a single model that gives efficient statistical estimation. A…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-01 Jun Han , Qiang Liu

(Mini-batch) Stochastic Gradient Descent is a popular optimization method which has been applied to many machine learning applications. But a rather high variance introduced by the stochastic gradient in each step may slow down the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-09 Jingchang Liu , Linli Xu

Variance reduction methods such as SVRG and SpiderBoost use a mixture of large and small batch gradients to reduce the variance of stochastic gradients. Compared to SGD, these methods require at least double the number of operations per…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-28 Melih Elibol , Lihua Lei , Michael I. Jordan

In many geoscientific applications, multiple noisy observations of different origin need to be combined to improve the reconstruction of a common underlying quantity. This naturally leads to multi-parameter models for which adequate…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-07-09 C. Gerhards , S. Pereverzyev , P. Tkachenko

Estimating the gradients of stochastic nodes in stochastic computational graphs is one of the crucial research questions in the deep generative modeling community, which enables the gradient descent optimization on neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Weonyoung Joo , Dongjun Kim , Seungjae Shin , Il-Chul Moon

Sharpness-aware Minimization (SAM) has been proposed recently to improve model generalization ability. However, SAM calculates the gradient twice in each optimization step, thereby doubling the computation costs compared to stochastic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Jiaxin Deng , Junbiao Pang , Baochang Zhang , Tian Wang

Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-02 Andriy Mnih , Danilo J. Rezende

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Jie Chen , Ronny Luss

Gradient Descent (GD) and Conjugate Gradient (CG) methods are among the most effective iterative algorithms for solving unconstrained optimization problems, particularly in machine learning and statistical modeling, where they are employed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-19 Xianqi Jiao , Jia Liu , Zhiping Chen

We investigate the role of noise in optimization algorithms for learning over-parameterized models. Specifically, we consider the recovery of a rank one matrix $Y^*\in R^{d\times d}$ from a noisy observation $Y$ using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-09 Tianyi Liu , Yan Li , Enlu Zhou , Tuo Zhao

Training models with discrete latent variables is challenging due to the high variance of unbiased gradient estimators. While low-variance reparameterization gradients of a continuous relaxation can provide an effective solution, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Zhe Dong , Andriy Mnih , George Tucker