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Robustness is essential for deep neural networks, especially in security-sensitive applications. To this end, randomized smoothing provides theoretical guarantees for certifying robustness against adversarial perturbations. Recently,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Jiachen Lei , Julius Berner , Jiongxiao Wang , Zhongzhu Chen , Zhongjia Ba , Kui Ren , Jun Zhu , Anima Anandkumar

Smoothing classifiers and probability density functions with Gaussian kernels appear unrelated, but in this work, they are unified for the problem of robust classification. The key building block is approximating the $\textit{energy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-05-12 Saeed Saremi , Rupesh Srivastava

We consider a distributionally robust formulation of stochastic optimization problems arising in statistical learning, where robustness is with respect to uncertainty in the underlying data distribution. Our formulation builds on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-09 Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Andrzej Ruszczyński , Landi Zhu

This paper formalizes and analyzes Gaussian smoothing applied to two prominent optimization methods: Stochastic Gradient Descent (GSmoothSGD) and Adam (GSmoothAdam) in deep learning. By attenuating small fluctuations, Gaussian smoothing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-19 Andrew Starnes , Clayton Webster

We study scalable alternatives to robust gradient descent (RGD) techniques that can be used when the losses and/or gradients can be heavy-tailed, though this will be unknown to the learner. The core technique is simple: instead of trying to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-15 Matthew J. Holland

This work proposes an accelerated first-order algorithm we call the Robust Momentum Method for optimizing smooth strongly convex functions. The algorithm has a single scalar parameter that can be tuned to trade off robustness to gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-27 Saman Cyrus , Bin Hu , Bryan Van Scoy , Laurent Lessard

Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to…

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-03 Soumyadip Ghosh , Mark Squillante , Ebisa Wollega

Probabilistic smoothing is a standard tool for global optimization, but existing methods rely on Gaussian kernels and specific transforms, often resulting in strong hyperparameter sensitivity and limited robustness. We propose a general…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kukyoung Jang , Taehyun Cho , Junrui Zhang , Ping Xu , Kyungjae Lee

We present a family of algorithms, called descent algorithms, for optimizing convex and non-convex functions. We also introduce a new first-order algorithm, called rescaled gradient descent (RGD), and show that RGD achieves a faster…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-07 Ashia Wilson , Lester Mackey , Andre Wibisono

We propose an algorithm for optimizations in which the gradients contain stochastic noise. This arises, for example, in structural optimizations when computations of forces and stresses rely on methods involving Monte Carlo sampling, such…

Materials Science · Physics 2022-11-30 Siyuan Chen , Shiwei Zhang

Randomized smoothing has shown promising certified robustness against adversaries in classification tasks. Despite such success with only zeroth-order access to base models, randomized smoothing has not been extended to a general form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Aref Miri Rekavandi , Olga Ohrimenko , Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein

We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-15 Ibrahim Merad , Stéphane Gaïffas

A new variant of Newton's method for empirical risk minimization is studied, where at each iteration of the optimization algorithm, the gradient and Hessian of the objective function are replaced by robust estimators taken from existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Eirini Ioannou , Muni Sreenivas Pydi , Po-Ling Loh

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,…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Basim Khajwal , C. -H. Luke Ong , Dominik Wagner

We propose a scalable robust learning algorithm combining kernel smoothing and robust optimization. Our method is motivated by the convex analysis perspective of distributionally robust optimization based on probability metrics, such as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Jia-Jie Zhu , Christina Kouridi , Yassine Nemmour , Bernhard Schölkopf

Deep neural networks are extremely successful in various applications, however they exhibit high computational demands and energy consumption. This is exacerbated by stuttering technology scaling, prompting the need for novel approaches to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-17 Hendrik Borras , Bernhard Klein , Holger Fröning

The data-centric machine learning aims to find effective ways to build appropriate datasets which can improve the performance of AI models. In this paper, we mainly focus on designing an efficient data-centric scheme to improve robustness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-09 Xiaogeng Liu , Haoyu Wang , Yechao Zhang , Fangzhou Wu , Shengshan Hu

Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-03 Yufeng Yang , Erin Tripp , Yifan Sun , Shaofeng Zou , Yi Zhou

Low-rank tensor models are widely used in statistics. However, most existing methods rely heavily on the assumption that data follows a sub-Gaussian distribution. To address the challenges associated with heavy-tailed distributions…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-16 Xiaoyu Zhang , Di Wang , Guodong Li , Defeng Sun