Related papers: Variance Reduction in Stochastic Particle-Optimiza…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based particle method for sampling from a target distribution, e.g., in generative modeling and Bayesian inference. SVGD does not require estimating the gradient of the log-density,…
Particle-based Bayesian inference methods by sampling from a partition-free target (posterior) distribution, e.g., Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), have attracted significant attention. We propose a path-guided particle-based…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based and non-parametric particle method for sampling from a target distribution, such as in Bayesian inference and other machine learning tasks. Different from other particle methods,…
Variance reduction methods such as SVRG and SpiderBoost use a mixture of large and small batch gradients to reduce the variance of stochastic gradients. Compared to SGD, these methods require at least double the number of operations per…
Uniform sampling of training data has been commonly used in traditional stochastic optimization algorithms such as Proximal Stochastic Gradient Descent (prox-SGD) and Proximal Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (prox-SDCA). Although uniform…
Small-Signal Stability Constrained Optimal Power Flow (SSSC-OPF) can provide additional stability measures and control strategies to guarantee the system to be small-signal stable. However, due to the nonsmooth property of the spectral…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…
Over the past ten years, driven by large scale optimisation problems arising from machine learning, the development of stochastic optimisation methods have witnessed a tremendous growth. However, despite their popularity, the theoretical…
Here we study non-convex composite optimization: first, a finite-sum of smooth but non-convex functions, and second, a general function that admits a simple proximal mapping. Most research on stochastic methods for composite optimization…
We study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient…
We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of \emph{heterogeneous} functions distributed across several machines with a focus on communication efficiency. In such settings, naively using the classical stochastic…
We consider multi-level composite optimization problems where each mapping in the composition is the expectation over a family of random smooth mappings or the sum of some finite number of smooth mappings. We present a normalized proximal…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
Variance reduction has been commonly used in stochastic optimization. It relies crucially on the assumption that the data set is finite. However, when the data are imputed with random noise as in data augmentation, the perturbed data set…
Stochastic gradient methods are dominant in nonconvex optimization especially for deep models but have low asymptotical convergence due to the fixed smoothness. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method for improving…
We develop two novel stochastic variance-reduction methods to approximate solutions of a class of nonmonotone [generalized] equations. Our algorithms leverage a new combination of ideas from the forward-reflected-backward splitting method…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used techniques for online optimization in machine learning. In this work, we accelerate SGD by adaptively learning how to sample the most useful training examples at each time…
In this paper we propose and analyze a novel multilevel version of Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). SVGD is a recent particle based variational inference method. For Bayesian inverse problems with computationally expensive…