Related papers: Low-variance Black-box Gradient Estimates for the …
We propose a simple algorithm to train stochastic neural networks to draw samples from given target distributions for probabilistic inference. Our method is based on iteratively adjusting the neural network parameters so that the output…
This paper presents a control variate-based Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for efficient sampling from the probability simplex, with a focus on applications in large-scale Bayesian models such as latent Dirichlet allocation. Standard…
In physics and engineering, many processes are modeled using non-differentiable black-box simulators, making the optimization of such functions particularly challenging. To address such cases, inspired by the Gradient Theorem, we propose…
In this paper, we propose new listwise learning-to-rank models that mitigate the shortcomings of existing ones. Existing listwise learning-to-rank models are generally derived from the classical Plackett-Luce model, which has three major…
Model predictive control (MPC) schemes have a proven track record for delivering aggressive and robust performance in many challenging control tasks, coping with nonlinear system dynamics, constraints, and observational noise. Despite their…
We study reinforcement learning for controlled diffusion processes with unbounded continuous state spaces, bounded continuous actions, and polynomially growing rewards: settings that arise naturally in finance, economics, and operations…
We present a multilevel stochastic gradient descent method for the optimal control of systems governed by partial differential equations under uncertain input data. The gradient descent method used to find the optimal control leverages a…
The Frank-Wolfe optimization algorithm has recently regained popularity for machine learning applications due to its projection-free property and its ability to handle structured constraints. However, in the stochastic learning setting, it…
Structured latent variables allow incorporating meaningful prior knowledge into deep learning models. However, learning with such variables remains challenging because of their discrete nature. Nowadays, the standard learning approach is to…
Rank-based metrics are some of the most widely used criteria for performance evaluation of computer vision models. Despite years of effort, direct optimization for these metrics remains a challenge due to their non-differentiable and…
We systematically develop a learning-based treatment of stochastic optimal control (SOC), relying on direct optimization of parametric control policies. We propose a derivation of adjoint sensitivity results for stochastic differential…
Stochastic gradient descent is a classic algorithm that has gained great popularity especially in the last decades as the most common approach for training models in machine learning. While the algorithm has been well-studied when…
In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…
Optimization problems with continuous data appear in, e.g., robust machine learning, functional data analysis, and variational inference. Here, the target function is given as an integral over a family of (continuously) indexed target…
Low-variance gradient estimation is crucial for learning directed graphical models parameterized by neural networks, where the reparameterization trick is widely used for those with continuous variables. While this technique gives…
In this paper we present a novel approach towards variance reduction for discretised diffusion processes. The proposed approach involves specially constructed control variates and allows for a significant reduction in the variance for the…
Black Box Variational Inference is a promising framework in a succession of recent efforts to make Variational Inference more ``black box". However, in basic version it either fails to converge due to instability or requires some…
Modern stochastic optimization methods often rely on uniform sampling which is agnostic to the underlying characteristics of the data. This might degrade the convergence by yielding estimates that suffer from a high variance. A possible…
In this paper we present an enhancement of the regression-based variance reduction approaches recently proposed in Belomestny et al. This enhancement is based on a truncation of the control variate and allows for a significant reduction of…
This paper considers a distributed stochastic strongly convex optimization, where agents connected over a network aim to cooperatively minimize the average of all agents' local cost functions. Due to the stochasticity of gradient estimation…