Related papers: A Stein variational Newton method
The training of machine learning models is typically carried out using some form of gradient descent, often with great success. However, non-asymptotic analyses of first-order optimization algorithms typically employ a gradient smoothness…
We present a filtering framework for online joint state estimation and parameter identification in nonlinear, time-varying systems. The algorithm uses Rao-Blackwellization technique to infer joint state-parameter posteriors efficiently. In…
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…
The minimization of the loss function is of paramount importance in deep neural networks. On the other hand, many popular optimization algorithms have been shown to correspond to some evolution equation of gradient flow type. Inspired by…
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…
Multilevel Stein variational gradient descent is a method for particle-based variational inference that leverages hierarchies of surrogate target distributions with varying costs and fidelity to computationally speed up inference. The…
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…
The mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is widely used in training machine learning models, in particular deep learning models. We study SGD dynamics under linear regression and two-layer linear networks, with an easy…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become the method of choice for solving a broad range of machine learning problems. However, some of its learning properties are still not fully understood. We consider least squares learning in…
Natural-gradient descent (NGD) on structured parameter spaces (e.g., low-rank covariances) is computationally challenging due to difficult Fisher-matrix computations. We address this issue by using \emph{local-parameter coordinates} to…
We show that, for finite-sum minimization problems, incorporating partial second-order information of the objective function can dramatically improve the robustness to mini-batch size of variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods, making…
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,…
We introduce data structures for solving robust regression through stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by sampling gradients with probability proportional to their norm, i.e., importance sampling. Although SGD is widely used for large scale…
Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…
Learning a stationary diffusion amounts to estimating the parameters of a stochastic differential equation whose stationary distribution matches a target distribution. We build on the recently introduced kernel deviation from stationarity…
Second-order training methods have better convergence properties than gradient descent but are rarely used in practice for large-scale training due to their computational overhead. This can be viewed as a hardware limitation (imposed by…
The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the…
A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…
3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a mainstream solution for novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. By explicitly encoding a 3D scene using a collection of Gaussian kernels, 3DGS achieves high-quality rendering with superior…
Decentralized coordination for multi-robot systems involves planning in challenging, high-dimensional spaces. The planning problem is particularly challenging in the presence of obstacles and different sources of uncertainty such as…