Related papers: Stochastic Variational Inference with Gradient Lin…

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,…

Bilevel optimization problems are receiving increasing attention in machine learning as they provide a natural framework for hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning. A key step to tackle these problems is the efficient computation of…

Our goal is to improve variance reducing stochastic methods through better control variates. We first propose a modification of SVRG which uses the Hessian to track gradients over time, rather than to recondition, increasing the correlation…

Recent works have shown that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) achieves the fast convergence rates of full-batch gradient descent for over-parameterized models satisfying certain interpolation conditions. However, the step-size used in…

In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. This point of view covers the stochastic gradient…

To accelerate the training of machine learning models, distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants have been widely adopted, which apply multiple workers in parallel to speed up training. Among them, Local SGD has gained…

Stein variational gradient decent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful approximate inference algorithm for complex distributions. However, the standard SVGD requires calculating the gradient of the target density and cannot be applied…

We introduce Support Decomposition Variational Inference (SDVI), a new variational inference (VI) approach for probabilistic programs with stochastic support. Existing approaches to this problem rely on designing a single global variational…

Stochastic natural gradient variational inference (NGVI) is a popular posterior inference method with applications in various probabilistic models. Despite its wide usage, little is known about the non-asymptotic convergence rate in the…

Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a popular parallel optimization algorithm in machine learning. Most theoretical analysis on ASGD take a discrete view and prove upper bounds for their convergence rates. However, the…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibits strong algorithmic regularization effects in practice, which has been hypothesized to play an important role in the generalization of modern machine learning approaches. In this work, we seek to…

Gaussian distributions are widely used in Bayesian variational inference to approximate intractable posterior densities, but the ability to accommodate skewness can improve approximation accuracy significantly, when data or prior…

In multi-goal Reinforcement Learning, an agent can share experience between related training tasks, resulting in better generalization for new tasks at test time. However, when the goal space has discontinuities and the reward is sparse, a…

We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of \emph{heterogeneous} functions distributed across several machines with a focus on communication efficiency. In such settings, naively using the classical stochastic…

We study online inference and asymptotic covariance estimation for the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. While classical methods (such as plug-in and batch-means estimators) are available, they either require inaccessible…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…

We present a uniform analysis of biased stochastic gradient methods for minimizing convex, strongly convex, and non-convex composite objectives, and identify settings where bias is useful in stochastic gradient estimation. The framework we…

Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) ensures strong guarantees with regards to convergence in measure for sampling log-concave posterior distributions by adding noise to stochastic gradient iterates. Given the size of many practical…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…