Related papers: Stochastic Learning for Sparse Discrete Markov Ran…
Learning a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is hard when the number of parameters is too large given the amount of available data. As a remedy, we propose restricting the GMM to a Gaussian Markov Random Field Mixture Model (GMRF-MM), as well as…
Models incorporating uncertain inputs, such as random forces or material parameters, have been of increasing interest in PDE-constrained optimization. In this paper, we focus on the efficient numerical minimization of a convex and smooth…
Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) algorithms have been shown to work favorably in solving large-scale learning problems. Despite the remarkable success, the stochastic gradient complexity of SVRG-type algorithms usually scales…
We study maximum likelihood estimation for spatial generalized linear mixed models with Gaussian process approximations using a stochastic Newton-Raphson algorithm. We consider two Gaussian Process approximations in this context: spectral…
Pairwise Markov Random Fields (MRFs) or undirected graphical models are parsimonious representations of joint probability distributions. Variables correspond to nodes of a graph, with edges between nodes corresponding to conditional…
We study the proximal gradient descent (PGD) method for $\ell^{0}$ sparse approximation problem as well as its accelerated optimization with randomized algorithms in this paper. We first offer theoretical analysis of PGD showing the bounded…
We consider Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) methods for Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems, where the goal is to find a policy using data from several tasks represented by Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that can be updated by one…
Optimizing with group sparsity is significant in enhancing model interpretability in machining learning applications, e.g., feature selection, compressed sensing and model compression. However, for large-scale stochastic training problems,…
Sparsity-inducing regularization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning applications, ranging from feature selection to model compression. In this paper, we present a novel stochastic method -- Orthant Based Proximal Stochastic…
In decentralized learning, a network of nodes cooperate to minimize an overall objective function that is usually the finite-sum of their local objectives, and incorporates a non-smooth regularization term for the better generalization…
We study the convergence rate of stochastic optimization of exact (NP-hard) objectives, for which only biased estimates of the gradient are available. We motivate this problem in the context of learning the structure and parameters of Ising…
The pseudo-likelihood method is one of the most popular algorithms for learning sparse binary pairwise Markov networks. In this paper, we formulate the $L_1$ regularized pseudo-likelihood problem as a sparse multiple logistic regression…
Consider the stochastic composition optimization problem where the objective is a composition of two expected-value functions. We propose a new stochastic first-order method, namely the accelerated stochastic compositional proximal gradient…
There are several applications of stochastic optimization where one can benefit from a robust estimate of the gradient. For example, domains such as distributed learning with corrupted nodes, the presence of large outliers in the training…
Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…
This paper studies how a stochastic gradient algorithm (SG) can be controlled to hide the estimate of the local stationary point from an eavesdropper. Such problems are of significant interest in distributed optimization settings like…
We study a version of the proximal gradient algorithm for which the gradient is intractable and is approximated by Monte Carlo methods (and in particular Markov Chain Monte Carlo). We derive conditions on the step size and the Monte Carlo…
We propose a novel adaptive empirical Bayesian method for sparse deep learning, where the sparsity is ensured via a class of self-adaptive spike-and-slab priors. The proposed method works by alternatively sampling from an adaptive…
A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The…