Related papers: Rao-Blackwellized Stochastic Gradients for Discret…
Variational Optimization forms a differentiable upper bound on an objective. We show that approaches such as Natural Evolution Strategies and Gaussian Perturbation, are special cases of Variational Optimization in which the expectations are…
We show how to transform a non-differentiable rasterizer into a differentiable one with minimal engineering efforts and no external dependencies (no Pytorch/Tensorflow). We rely on Stochastic Gradient Estimation, a technique that consists…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
In the past few years, following the differentiable programming paradigm, there has been a growing interest in computing the gradient information of physical processes (e.g., physical simulation, image rendering). However, such processes…
We propose a simple and general variant of the standard reparameterized gradient estimator for the variational evidence lower bound. Specifically, we remove a part of the total derivative with respect to the variational parameters that…
A new paradigm to estimate the gradient of a black-box scalar function is introduced, considering it as a member of a set of admissible gradients that are computed using existing function samples. Results on gradient estimate accuracy,…
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,…
In Bayesian inference, we seek to compute information about random variables such as moments or quantiles on the basis of {available data} and prior information. When the distribution of random variables is {intractable}, Monte Carlo (MC)…
Randomized methods, such as the randomized SVD (singular value decomposition) and Nystr\"om approximation, are an effective way to compute low-rank approximations of large matrices. Motivated by applications to operator learning, Boull\'e…
The problem of covariance estimation for replicated surface-valued processes is examined from the functional data analysis perspective. Considerations of statistical and computational efficiency often compel the use of separability of the…
Stochastic gradient algorithm is a key ingredient of many machine learning methods, particularly appropriate for large-scale learning.However, a major caveat of large data is their incompleteness.We propose an averaged stochastic gradient…
We propose a stochastic gradient framework for solving stochastic composite convex optimization problems with (possibly) infinite number of linear inclusion constraints that need to be satisfied almost surely. We use smoothing and homotopy…
We consider the problem of minimizing the composition of a smooth (nonconvex) function and a smooth vector mapping, where the inner mapping is in the form of an expectation over some random variable or a finite sum. We propose a stochastic…
Labeling cost is often expensive and is a fundamental limitation of supervised learning. In this paper, we study importance labeling problem, in which we are given many unlabeled data and select a limited number of data to be labeled from…
In this work we are interested in the problems of supervised learning and variable selection when the input-output dependence is described by a nonlinear function depending on a few variables. Our goal is to consider a sparse nonparametric…
High-dimensional count data poses significant challenges for statistical analysis, necessitating effective methods that also preserve explainability. We focus on a low rank constrained variant of the Poisson log-normal model, which relates…
Casella and Robert [Biometrika 83 (1996) 81--94] presented a general Rao--Blackwellization principle for accept-reject and Metropolis--Hastings schemes that leads to significant decreases in the variance of the resulting estimators, but at…
We consider derivative-free black-box global optimization of expensive noisy functions, when most of the randomness in the objective is produced by a few influential scalar random inputs. We present a new Bayesian global optimization…
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…
Compressive covariance estimation has arisen as a class of techniques whose aim is to obtain second-order statistics of stochastic processes from compressive measurements. Recently, these methods have been used in various image processing…