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Scale variation is a deep-rooted problem in object counting, which has not been effectively addressed by existing scale-aware algorithms. An important factor is that they typically involve cooperative learning across multi-resolutions,…
In high-dimensional and/or non-parametric regression problems, regularization (or penalization) is used to control model complexity and induce desired structure. Each penalty has a weight parameter that indicates how strongly the structure…
In this paper, we propose a scalable algorithm for spectral embedding. The latter is a standard tool for graph clustering. However, its computational bottleneck is the eigendecomposition of the graph Laplacian matrix, which prevents its…
It has been widely documented that the sampling and resampling steps in particle filters cannot be differentiated. The {\itshape reparameterisation trick} was introduced to allow the sampling step to be reformulated into a differentiable…
In this work, we investigate the idea of variance reduction by studying its properties with general adaptive mirror descent algorithms in nonsmooth nonconvex finite-sum optimization problems. We propose a simple yet generalized framework…
Increasing effort is put into the development of methods for learning mechanistic models from data. This task entails not only the accurate estimation of parameters but also a suitable model structure. Recent work on the discovery of…
In this paper, a shape optimization problem constrained by a random elliptic partial differential equation with a pure Neumann boundary is presented. The model is motivated by applications in interface identification, where we assume…
Modern statistical inference tasks often require iterative optimization methods to compute the solution. Convergence analysis from an optimization viewpoint only informs us how well the solution is approximated numerically but overlooks the…
We propose a reparametrization scheme to address the challenges of applying differentially private SGD on large neural networks, which are 1) the huge memory cost of storing individual gradients, 2) the added noise suffering notorious…
We explore why many recently proposed robust estimation problems are efficiently solvable, even though the underlying optimization problems are non-convex. We study the loss landscape of these robust estimation problems, and identify the…
This note studies the distributed non-convex optimization problem with non-smooth regularization, which has wide applications in decentralized learning, estimation and control. The objective function is the sum of different local objective…
Unsupervised representation learning has been extensively employed in anomaly detection, achieving impressive performance. Extracting valuable feature vectors that can remarkably improve the performance of anomaly detection are essential in…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…
Parameter inference is a fundamental problem in data-driven modeling. Given observed data that is believed to be a realization of some parameterized model, the aim is to find parameter values that are able to explain the observed data. In…
Variance parameter estimation in linear mixed models is a challenge for many classical nonlinear optimization algorithms due to the positive-definiteness constraint of the random effects covariance matrix. We take a completely novel view on…
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…
We investigate a local reparameterizaton technique for greatly reducing the variance of stochastic gradients for variational Bayesian inference (SGVB) of a posterior over model parameters, while retaining parallelizability. This local…
The stochastic block model is able to generate different network partitions, ranging from traditional assortative communities to disassortative structures. Since the degree-corrected stochastic block model does not specify which mixing…
Reasoning about 3D scenes from their 2D image projections is one of the core problems in computer vision. Solutions to this inverse and ill-posed problem typically involve a search for models that best explain observed image data. Notably,…
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,…