Related papers: Variance Reduction in Stochastic Particle-Optimiza…
Particle-optimization-based sampling (POS) is a recently developed effective sampling technique that interactively updates a set of particles. A representative algorithm is the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). We prove, under…
There has been recent interest in developing scalable Bayesian sampling methods such as stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) for big-data analysis. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples…
In this paper, we present a flow-based method for global optimization of continuous Sobolev functions, called Stein Boltzmann Sampling (SBS). SBS initializes uniformly a number of particles representing candidate solutions, then uses the…
Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…
Sampling from an unnormalized target distribution is an essential problem with many applications in probabilistic inference. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful method that iteratively updates a set of…
Stochastic algorithms, especially stochastic gradient descent (SGD), have proven to be the go-to methods in data science and machine learning. In recent years, the stochastic proximal point algorithm (SPPA) emerged, and it was shown to be…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been increasingly popular in Bayesian learning due to its ability to deal with large data. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples from a discretized-time Markov chain to…
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…
We study optimization algorithms based on variance reduction for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Remarkable recent progress has been made in this direction through development of algorithms like SAG, SVRG, SAGA. These algorithms have…
Stochastic gradients have been widely integrated into Langevin-based methods to improve their scalability and efficiency in solving large-scale sampling problems. However, the proximal sampler, which exhibits much faster convergence than…
Variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods have gained popularity in recent times. Several variants exist with different strategies for the storing and sampling of gradients and this work concerns the interactions between these two…
We introduce adaptive, tuning-free step size schedules for gradient-based sampling algorithms obtained as time-discretizations of Wasserstein gradient flows. The result is a suite of tuning-free sampling algorithms, including tuning-free…
Stochastic equations play an important role in computational science, due to their ability to treat a wide variety of complex statistical problems. However, current algorithms are strongly limited by their sampling variance, which scales…
Stochastic Gradient Boosting (SGB) is a widely used approach to regularization of boosting models based on decision trees. It was shown that, in many cases, random sampling at each iteration can lead to better generalization performance of…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…
In the context of finite sums minimization, variance reduction techniques are widely used to improve the performance of state-of-the-art stochastic gradient methods. Their practical impact is clear, as well as their theoretical properties.…
In this paper, we proposed a new technique, {\em variance controlled stochastic gradient} (VCSG), to improve the performance of the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithm. To avoid over-reducing the variance of gradient by…
We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…
In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…
This paper considers a class of constrained stochastic composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a certain non-differentiable (but…