Related papers: Low-variance Black-box Gradient Estimates for the …
We develop an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve the affine rank minimization problem consists of finding a matrix of minimum rank from linear measurements. The proposed algorithm as a stochastic…
We address the problem of training models with black-box and hard-to-optimize metrics by expressing the metric as a monotonic function of a small number of easy-to-optimize surrogates. We pose the training problem as an optimization over a…
We introduce overdispersed black-box variational inference, a method to reduce the variance of the Monte Carlo estimator of the gradient in black-box variational inference. Instead of taking samples from the variational distribution, we use…
Multinomial logistic regression is one of the most popular models for modelling the effect of explanatory variables on a subject choice between a set of specified options. This model has found numerous applications in machine learning,…
We derive an unbiased estimator for expectations over discrete random variables based on sampling without replacement, which reduces variance as it avoids duplicate samples. We show that our estimator can be derived as the…
Despite advances in deep probabilistic models, learning discrete latent representations remains challenging. This work introduces a novel method to improve inference in discrete Variational Autoencoders by reframing the inference problem…
Training deep generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) requires propagating gradients through stochastic latent variables, which introduces estimation variance that can slow convergence and degrade performance. In this paper,…
Designing learning algorithms that are resistant to perturbations of the underlying data distribution is a problem of wide practical and theoretical importance. We present a general approach to this problem focusing on unsupervised…
We propose to optimize neural networks with a uniformly-distributed random learning rate. The associated stochastic gradient descent algorithm can be approximated by continuous stochastic equations and analyzed within the Fokker-Planck…
We propose a discrete latent distribution for Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Instead of drawing latent vectors from a continuous prior, we sample from a finite set of learnable latents. However, a direct parametrization of such a…
We employ constraints to control the parameter space of deep neural networks throughout training. The use of customized, appropriately designed constraints can reduce the vanishing/exploding gradients problem, improve smoothness of…
The paper studies the distributed stochastic compositional optimization problems over networks, where all the agents' inner-level function is the sum of each agent's private expectation function. Focusing on the aggregative structure of the…
We reconsider the variational integration of optimal control problems for mechanical systems based on a direct discretization of the Lagrange-d'Alembert principle. This approach yields discrete dynamical constraints which by construction…
In this work we investigate the practicality of stochastic gradient descent and recently introduced variants with variance-reduction techniques in imaging inverse problems. Such algorithms have been shown in the machine learning literature…
This paper proposes a model predictive controller for discrete-time linear systems with additive, possibly unbounded, stochastic disturbances and subject to chance constraints. By computing a polytopic probabilistic positively invariant set…
This paper proposes a distributed stochastic projection-free algorithm for large-scale constrained finite-sum optimization whose constraint set is complicated such that the projection onto the constraint set can be expensive. The global…
Probabilistic models with discrete latent variables naturally capture datasets composed of discrete classes. However, they are difficult to train efficiently, since backpropagation through discrete variables is generally not possible. We…
The reparameterization trick enables optimizing large scale stochastic computation graphs via gradient descent. The essence of the trick is to refactor each stochastic node into a differentiable function of its parameters and a random…
Large language model (LLM) training is often bottlenecked by memory constraints and stochastic gradient noise in extremely high-dimensional parameter spaces. Motivated by empirical evidence that many LLM gradient matrices are effectively…
Stochastic coordinate descent algorithms are efficient methods in which each iterate is obtained by fixing most coordinates at their values from the current iteration, and approximately minimizing the objective with respect to the remaining…