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We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-16 Björn Engquist , Kui Ren , Yunan Yang

Recently authors have introduced the idea of training discrete weights neural networks using a mix between classical simulated annealing and a replica ansatz known from the statistical physics literature. Among other points, they claim…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Vincent Gripon , Matthias Löwe , Franck Vermet

Several recent unsupervised learning methods use probabilistic approaches to solve combinatorial optimization (CO) problems based on the assumption of statistically independent solution variables. We demonstrate that this assumption imposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Sebastian Sanokowski , Wilhelm Berghammer , Sepp Hochreiter , Sebastian Lehner

Differentiable simulation is a promising toolkit for fast gradient-based policy optimization and system identification. However, existing approaches to differentiable simulation have largely tackled scenarios where obtaining smooth…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-04 Rika Antonova , Jingyun Yang , Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula , Jeannette Bohg

Quantum annealing is a heuristic optimization algorithm that exploits quantum evolution to approximately find lowest energy states. Quantum annealers have scaled up in recent years to tackle increasingly larger and more highly connected…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-07-04 Humberto Munoz Bauza , Daniel A. Lidar

Inspired by the Fleming-Viot stochastic process, we propose a parallel implementation of variational quantum algorithms with the aim of reducing the time spent by the algorithm in barren plateaus, where optimization direction is unclear. In…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-12-17 Daniel Mastropietro , Georgios Korpas , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Jakub Marecek

Quantum annealing is a generic name of quantum algorithms to use quantum-mechanical fluctuations to search for the solution of optimization problem. It shares the basic idea with quantum adiabatic evolution studied actively in quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2009-11-13 Satoshi Morita , Hidetoshi Nishimori

Although quantum annealing is usually considered as a method for locating the ground states of difficult spin-glass and optimization problems, its use in approximate optimization -- finding low- but not zero-energy states in a reasonably…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-26 Christopher L. Baldwin

We introduce SPRING, a novel stochastic proximal alternating linearized minimization algorithm for solving a class of non-smooth and non-convex optimization problems. Large-scale imaging problems are becoming increasingly prevalent due to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-20 Derek Driggs , Junqi Tang , Jingwei Liang , Mike Davies , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

Variational inference (VI) combined with data subsampling enables approximate posterior inference over large data sets, but suffers from poor local optima. We first formulate a deterministic annealing approach for the generic class of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-31 Stephan Mandt , James McInerney , Farhan Abrol , Rajesh Ranganath , David Blei

Population Monte Carlo simulations in the form commonly referred to as population annealing can serve as a useful meta-algorithm for simulating systems with complex free-energy landscapes. In the present paper we provide an easily…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-01-17 P. L. Ebert , D. Gessert , W. Janke , M. Weigel

We propose a variational regularization approach based on a multiscale representation called cylindrical shearlets aimed at dynamic imaging problems, especially dynamic tomography. The intuitive idea of our approach is to integrate a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-08-05 Tatiana A. Bubba , Tommi Heikkilä , Demetrio Labate , Luca Ratti

The Path Integral Monte Carlo simulated Quantum Annealing algorithm is applied to the optimization of a large hard instance of the Random 3-SAT Problem (N=10000). The dynamical behavior of the quantum and the classical annealing are…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2009-11-11 Demian Battaglia , Giuseppe Santoro , Erio Tosatti

Deep neural networks, when optimized with sufficient data, provide accurate representations of high-dimensional functions; in contrast, function approximation techniques that have predominated in scientific computing do not scale well with…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2021-03-15 Grant M. Rotskoff , Andrew R. Mitchell , Eric Vanden-Eijnden

We introduce a new multimodal optimization approach called Natural Variational Annealing (NVA) that combines the strengths of three foundational concepts to simultaneously search for multiple global and local modes of black-box nonconvex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-18 Tâm LeMinh , Julyan Arbel , Thomas Möllenhoff , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Florence Forbes

The paper considers a distributed algorithm for global minimization of a nonconvex function. The algorithm is a first-order consensus + innovations type algorithm that incorporates decaying additive Gaussian noise for annealing, converging…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-23 Brian Swenson , Soummya Kar , H. Vincent Poor , José M. F. Moura

Estimating the density of states of systems with rugged free energy landscapes is a notoriously difficult task of the utmost importance in many areas of physics ranging from spin glasses to biopolymers. Density of states estimation has also…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2019-07-31 Lev Barash , Jeffrey Marshall , Martin Weigel , Itay Hen

The problem of adversarial examples has shown that modern Neural Network (NN) models could be rather fragile. Among the more established techniques to solve the problem, one is to require the model to be {\it $\epsilon$-adversarially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Yuxin Wen , Shuai Li , Kui Jia

Providing an optimal path to a quantum annealing algorithm is key to finding good approximate solutions to computationally hard optimization problems. Reinforcement is one of the strategies that can be used to circumvent the exponentially…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2022-07-27 Abolfazl Ramezanpour

Variational data assimilation optimizes for an initial state of a dynamical system such that its evolution fits observational data. The physical model can subsequently be evolved into the future to make predictions. This principle is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Thomas Frerix , Dmitrii Kochkov , Jamie A. Smith , Daniel Cremers , Michael P. Brenner , Stephan Hoyer