Related papers: Minimal Variance Sampling in Stochastic Gradient B…
Many Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods leverage gradient information of the potential function of target distribution to explore sample space efficiently. However, computing gradients can often be computationally expensive for large…
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…
The learning rate is an important tuning parameter for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and can greatly influence its performance. However, appropriate selection of a learning rate schedule across all iterations typically requires a…
We present an optimizer which uses Bayesian optimization to tune the system parameters of distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Given a specific context, our goal is to quickly find efficient configurations which appropriately…
In high dimensions, most machine learning method perform fragile even there are a little outliers. To address this, we hope to introduce a new method with the base learner, such as Bayesian regression or stochastic gradient descent to solve…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
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…
Approximate inference in complex probabilistic models such as deep Gaussian processes requires the optimisation of doubly stochastic objective functions. These objectives incorporate randomness both from mini-batch subsampling of the data…
Stochastic gradient MCMC (SGMCMC) offers a scalable alternative to traditional MCMC, by constructing an unbiased estimate of the gradient of the log-posterior with a small, uniformly-weighted subsample of the data. While efficient to…
We analyze a batched variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with weighted sampling distribution for smooth and non-smooth objective functions. We show that by distributing the batches computationally, a significant speedup in the…
The tuning of stochastic gradient algorithms (SGAs) for optimization and sampling is often based on heuristics and trial-and-error rather than generalizable theory. We address this theory--practice gap by characterizing the large-sample…
Stochastic nested optimization, including stochastic compositional, min-max and bilevel optimization, is gaining popularity in many machine learning applications. While the three problems share the nested structure, existing works often…
Bagging, a powerful ensemble method from machine learning, improves the performance of unstable predictors. Although the power of Bagging has been shown mostly in classification problems, we demonstrate the success of employing Bagging in…
In this work we define a unified mathematical framework to deepen our understanding of the role of stochastic gradient (SG) noise on the behavior of Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling (SGMCMC) algorithms. Our formulation unlocks the design…
Recent advances in policy gradient methods and deep learning have demonstrated their applicability for complex reinforcement learning problems. However, the variance of the performance gradient estimates obtained from the simulation is…
Stochastic gradient descent (\textsc{Sgd}) methods are the most powerful optimization tools in training machine learning and deep learning models. Moreover, acceleration (a.k.a. momentum) methods and diagonal scaling (a.k.a. adaptive…
For infinitesimal learning rates, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) follows the path of gradient flow on the full batch loss function. However moderately large learning rates can achieve higher test accuracies, and this generalization…
The performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) depends critically on how learning rates are tuned and decreased over time. We propose a method to automatically adjust multiple learning rates so as to minimize the expected error at any…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
This paper proposes SplitSGD, a new dynamic learning rate schedule for stochastic optimization. This method decreases the learning rate for better adaptation to the local geometry of the objective function whenever a stationary phase is…