Related papers: Improved Gradient-Based Optimization Over Discrete…
Gradient-based optimization methods are commonly used to identify local optima in high-dimensional spaces. When derivatives cannot be evaluated directly, stochastic estimators can provide approximate gradients. However, these estimators'…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have limitations when the goal is to generate sequences of discrete elements. The reason for this is that samples from a distribution on discrete objects such as the multinomial are not differentiable…
Implicit feedback is widely leveraged in recommender systems since it is easy to collect and provides weak supervision signals. Recent works reveal a huge gap between the implicit feedback and user-item relevance due to the fact that…
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…
Standard approaches to stochastic gradient estimation, with only noisy black-box function evaluations, use the finite-difference method or its variants. While natural, it is open to our knowledge whether their statistical accuracy is the…
The softmax representation of probabilities for categorical variables plays a prominent role in modern machine learning with numerous applications in areas such as large scale classification, neural language modeling and recommendation…
This paper addresses the distributed stochastic minimax optimization problem subject to stochastic constraints. We propose a novel first-order Softmax-Weighted Switching Gradient method tailored for federated learning. Under full client…
We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…
Numerous models for supervised and reinforcement learning benefit from combinations of discrete and continuous model components. End-to-end learnable discrete-continuous models are compositional, tend to generalize better, and are more…
We introduce Gradient Agreement Filtering (GAF) to improve on gradient averaging in distributed deep learning optimization. Traditional distributed data-parallel stochastic gradient descent involves averaging gradients of microbatches to…
Gradient estimation -- approximating the gradient of an expectation with respect to the parameters of a distribution -- is central to the solution of many machine learning problems. However, when the distribution is discrete, most common…
Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…
The Gumbel-Softmax probability distribution allows learning discrete tokens in generative learning, while the Gumbel-Argmax probability distribution is useful in learning discrete structures in discriminative learning. Despite the efforts…
Training a classifier over a large number of classes, known as 'extreme classification', has become a topic of major interest with applications in technology, science, and e-commerce. Traditional softmax regression induces a gradient cost…
Stochastic kinetic models are ubiquitous in physics, yet inferring their parameters from experimental data remains challenging. In deterministic models, parameter inference often relies on gradients, as they can be obtained efficiently…
In recent years, fairness in machine learning has emerged as a critical concern to ensure that developed and deployed predictive models do not have disadvantageous predictions for marginalized groups. It is essential to mitigate…
The rapid increase in the parameters of deep learning models has led to significant costs, challenging computational efficiency and model interpretability. In this paper, we introduce a novel and straightforward neural network pruning…
An influential line of recent work has focused on the generalization properties of unregularized gradient-based learning procedures applied to separable linear classification with exponentially-tailed loss functions. The ability of such…
Differentially private SGD (DP-SGD) holds the promise of enabling the safe and responsible application of machine learning to sensitive datasets. However, DP-SGD only provides a biased, noisy estimate of a mini-batch gradient. This renders…
A fundamental challenge in neurosymbolic systems is applying continuous gradient-based optimization to discrete logical domains. While fuzzy relaxations provide differentiability, they often lack a formal structural alignment with classical…