Related papers: Better scalability under potentially heavy-tailed …
Robust controllers that stabilize dynamical systems even under disturbances and noise are often formulated as solutions of nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems. While methods such as gradient sampling can handle the nonconvexity and…
The success of deep learning depends on large-scale and well-curated training data, while data in real-world applications are commonly long-tailed and noisy. Many methods have been proposed to deal with long-tailed data or noisy data, while…
This paper studies decentralized stochastic nonconvex optimization problem over row-stochastic networks. We consider the heavy-tailed gradient noise which is empirically observed in many popular real-world applications. Specifically, we…
The performance of gradient-based optimization methods, such as standard gradient descent (GD), greatly depends on the choice of learning rate. However, it can require a non-trivial amount of user tuning effort to select an appropriate…
Researchers have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in sequential decision making problems (e.g., robotics control, sequential prediction) with deep neural network models. One often has access to near-optimal oracles that achieve…
We consider the task of heavy-tailed statistical estimation given streaming $p$-dimensional samples. This could also be viewed as stochastic optimization under heavy-tailed distributions, with an additional $O(p)$ space complexity…
This paper studies the case of possibly high-dimensional covariates in the regression discontinuity design (RDD) analysis. In particular, we propose estimation and inference methods for the RDD models with covariate selection which perform…
Heavy-tailed noise is pervasive in modern machine learning applications, arising from data heterogeneity, outliers, and non-stationary stochastic environments. While second-order methods can significantly accelerate convergence in…
Robust correlation estimation is essential in high-dimensional settings, particularly when data are contaminated by outliers or exhibit heavy-tailed behavior. Many robust loss functions of practical interest-such as those involving…
A major challenge in training large-scale machine learning models is configuring the training process to maximize model performance, i.e., finding the best training setup from a vast design space. In this work, we unlock a gradient-based…
Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…
Neural network compression techniques have become increasingly popular as they can drastically reduce the storage and computation requirements for very large networks. Recent empirical studies have illustrated that even simple pruning…
Randomized subspace methods reduce per-iteration cost; however, in nonconvex optimization, most analyses are expectation-based, and high-probability bounds remain scarce even under sub-Gaussian noise. We first prove that randomized subspace…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…
This paper introduces the partial Gini covariance, a novel dependence measure that addresses the challenges of high-dimensional inference with heavy-tailed errors, often encountered in fields like finance, insurance, climate, and biology.…
Arguably the biggest challenge in applying neural networks is tuning the hyperparameters, in particular the learning rate. The sensitivity to the learning rate is due to the reliance on backpropagation to train the network. In this paper we…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
In this paper, we propose a new accelerated stochastic first-order method called clipped-SSTM for smooth convex stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed distributed noise in stochastic gradients and derive the first high-probability…
This paper proposes a novel parameter selection strategy for kernel-based gradient descent (KGD) algorithms, integrating bias-variance analysis with the splitting method. We introduce the concept of empirical effective dimension to quantify…