Related papers: Stein Variational Gradient Descent: many-particle …
We investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…
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…
The current interpretation of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) as a stochastic process lacks generality in that its numerical scheme restricts continuous-time dynamics as well as the loss function and the distribution of gradient noise. We…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are widely used and highly effective optimization methods in machine learning, especially for neural network training. By using a single datum or a small subset of the data, selected…
Particle-based Bayesian inference methods by sampling from a partition-free target (posterior) distribution, e.g., Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), have attracted significant attention. We propose a path-guided particle-based…
Variational Bayes (VB) is a popular scalable alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference. We study a mean-field spike and slab VB approximation of widely used Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional…
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…
This paper examines the spatial coverage optimization problem for multiple sensors in a known convex environment, where the coverage service of each sensor is heterogeneous and anisotropic. We introduce the Stein Coverage algorithm, a…
In this paper, we investigate the theoretical properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for statistical inference in the context of nonconvex optimization problems, which have been relatively unexplored compared to convex settings.…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
We present a novel second-order trajectory optimization algorithm based on Stein Variational Newton's Method and Maximum Entropy Differential Dynamic Programming. The proposed algorithm, called Stein Variational Differential Dynamic…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the workhorse algorithm of deep learning technology. At each step of the training phase, a mini batch of samples is drawn from the training dataset and the weights of the neural network are adjusted…
We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…
Deep neural networks (DNN) are typically optimized using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the estimation of the gradient using stochastic samples tends to be noisy and unreliable, resulting in large gradient variance and bad…
The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the \emph{classical} central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made…
Stochastic gradient descent updates parameters with summation gradient computed from a random data batch. This summation will lead to unbalanced training process if the data we obtained is unbalanced. To address this issue, this paper takes…
Inspired by the seminal work on Stein Variational Inference and Stein Variational Policy Gradient, we derived a method to generate samples from the posterior variational parameter distribution by \textit{explicitly} minimizing the KL…
We introduce a doubly stochastic proximal gradient algorithm for optimizing a finite average of smooth convex functions, whose gradients depend on numerically expensive expectations. Our main motivation is the acceleration of the…
In several experimental reports on nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was observed to prefer minimizers with flat basins in comparison to more deterministic methods, yet there is very…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is commonly modeled as a Langevin process, assuming that minibatch noise acts as Brownian motion. However, this approximation relies on a continuous-time limit and a sqrt(eta) noise scaling that does not…