Related papers: Stochastic Learning for Sparse Discrete Markov Ran…
In the paper we address the problem of finding the most probable state of discrete Markov random field (MRF) with associative pairwise terms. Although of practical importance, this problem is known to be NP-hard in general. We propose a new…
In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…
This paper presents a new approach to the recovery of a spectrally sparse signal (SSS) from partially observed entries, focusing on challenges posed by large-scale data and heavy noise environments. The SSS reconstruction can be formulated…
Stochastic sampling methods are arguably the most direct and least intrusive means of incorporating parametric uncertainty into numerical simulations of partial differential equations with random inputs. However, to achieve an overall error…
Discrete Markov random fields are undirected graphical models that capture complex conditional dependencies between discrete variables. Conducting exact posterior inference in these models is often computationally challenging because…
Increasing effort is put into the development of methods for learning mechanistic models from data. This task entails not only the accurate estimation of parameters but also a suitable model structure. Recent work on the discovery of…
In this paper, we discuss application of iterative Stochastic Optimization routines to the problem of sparse signal recovery from noisy observation. Using Stochastic Mirror Descent algorithm as a building block, we develop a multistage…
We prove closed-form equations for the exact high-dimensional asymptotics of a family of first order gradient-based methods, learning an estimator (e.g. M-estimator, shallow neural network, ...) from observations on Gaussian data with…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
Stochastic Proximal Gradient (SPG) methods have been widely used for solving optimization problems with a simple (possibly non-smooth) regularizer in machine learning and statistics. However, to the best of our knowledge no non-asymptotic…
Stochastic saddle point (SSP) problems are, in general, less studied compared to stochastic minimization problems. However, SSP problems emerge from machine learning (adversarial training, e.g., GAN, AUC maximization), statistics (robust…
Motivated by applications of large embedding models, we study differentially private (DP) optimization problems under sparsity of individual gradients. We start with new near-optimal bounds for the classic mean estimation problem but with…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…
We develop the method of stochastic modified equations (SME), in which stochastic gradient algorithms are approximated in the weak sense by continuous-time stochastic differential equations. We exploit the continuous formulation together…
Stochastic versions of proximal methods have gained much attention in statistics and machine learning. These algorithms tend to admit simple, scalable forms, and enjoy numerical stability via implicit updates. In this work, we propose and…
We propose an inexact variable-metric proximal point algorithm to accelerate gradient-based optimization algorithms. The proposed scheme, called QNing can be notably applied to incremental first-order methods such as the stochastic…
We study recursive maximum likelihood estimation for stochastic interacting particle systems based on continuous observation of a single particle. In this regime, consistent estimation of the finite-particle log-likelihood is not possible,…
We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…
Memristor based neural networks have great potentials in on-chip neuromorphic computing systems due to the fast computation and low-energy consumption. However, the imprecise properties of existing memristor devices generally result in…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…