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The Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) are popularly used to approximate Bayesian posterior distributions in statistical learning procedures with large-scale data. As opposed to many usual Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a ubiquitous algorithm for a variety of machine learning problems. Researchers and industry have developed several techniques to optimize SGD's runtime performance, including asynchronous execution and…

Many relevant problems in the area of systems and control, such as controller synthesis, observer design and model reduction, can be viewed as optimization problems involving dynamical systems: for instance, maximizing performance in the…

Flatness of the loss landscape has been widely studied as an important perspective for understanding the behavior and generalization of deep learning algorithms. Motivated by this view, we propose Flatness-Aware Stochastic Gradient Langevin…

Langevin dynamics (LD) has been proven to be a powerful technique for optimizing a non-convex objective as an efficient algorithm to find local minima while eventually visiting a global minimum on longer time-scales. LD is based on the…

Applying standard Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms to large data sets is computationally infeasible. The recently proposed stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) method circumvents this problem in three ways: it generates…

Approximate Bayesian inference estimates descriptors of an intractable target distribution - in essence, an optimization problem within a family of distributions. For example, Langevin dynamics (LD) extracts asymptotically exact samples…

We study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the main algorithm behind a large body of work in machine learning. In many cases, constraints are enforced via projections, leading to projected stochastic gradient algorithms. In recent years, a large…

The multinomial logistic regression (MLR) model is widely used in statistics and machine learning. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the most common approach for determining the parameters of a MLR model in big data scenarios. However,…

Bayesian deep learning offers a principled way to address many issues concerning safety of artificial intelligence (AI), such as model uncertainty,model interpretability, and prediction bias. However, due to the lack of efficient Monte…

Stochastic distributed optimization methods that solve an optimization problem over a multi-agent network have played an important role in a variety of large-scale signal processing and machine leaning applications. Among the existing…

We study the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm, which optimises a set of particles to approximate a target probability distribution $\pi\propto e^{-V}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. In the population limit, SVGD performs gradient…

We study learning to learn for regression problems through the lens of hyperparameter tuning. We propose the Langevin Gradient Descent Algorithm (LGD), which approximates the mean of the posterior distribution defined by the loss function…

This work proposes a simple yet effective sampling framework for combinatorial optimization (CO). Our method builds on discrete Langevin dynamics (LD), an efficient gradient-guided generative paradigm. However, we observe that directly…

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

In this paper, we propose a novel sufficient decrease technique for stochastic variance reduced gradient descent methods such as SVRG and SAGA. In order to make sufficient decrease for stochastic optimization, we design a new sufficient…

We consider the geometric ergodicity of the Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) algorithm under nonconvexity settings. Via the technique of reflection coupling, we prove the Wasserstein contraction of SGLD when the target…

This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and…

Variance reduction (VR) methods employ stochastic gradients with decreasing variance, and they have been widely applied to solve large-scale optimization problems in machine learning because of their efficiency. Existing theoretical studies…