Related papers: Stein Variational Gradient Descent: many-particle …

SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent…

Stochastic particle-optimization sampling (SPOS) is a recently-developed scalable Bayesian sampling framework that unifies stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) algorithms based on Wasserstein…

This paper studies the problem of distributed stochastic optimization in an adversarial setting where, out of the $m$ machines which allegedly compute stochastic gradients every iteration, an $\alpha$-fraction are Byzantine, and can behave…

We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained.…

State space models (SSMs) are a flexible approach to modeling complex time series. However, inference in SSMs is often computationally prohibitive for long time series. Stochastic gradient MCMC (SGMCMC) is a popular method for scalable…

Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), though being extensively used in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning, suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality. We address this issue by proposing the sliced Stein discrepancy and its scalable and…

We study a distributed consensus-based stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and show that the rate of convergence involves the spectral properties of two matrices: the standard spectral gap of a weight matrix from the network…

A theoretical, and potentially also practical, problem with stochastic gradient descent is that trajectories may escape to infinity. In this note, we investigate uniform boundedness properties of iterates and function values along the…

Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a sampling scheme for Bayesian modeling adapted to large datasets and models. SGLD relies on the injection of Gaussian Noise at each step of a Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) update. In this…

The Stochastic Gradient Descent method (SGD) and its stochastic variants have become methods of choice for solving finite-sum optimization problems arising from machine learning and data science thanks to their ability to handle large-scale…

In this paper we study the problem of minimizing the average of a large number ($n$) of smooth convex loss functions. We propose a new method, S2GD (Semi-Stochastic Gradient Descent), which runs for one or several epochs in each of which a…

Gradient information on the sampling distribution can be used to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators via Stein's method. An important application is that of estimating an expectation of a test function along the sample path of a…

Atomic-scale materials synthesis via layer deposition techniques present a unique opportunity to control material structures and yield systems that display unique functional properties that cannot be stabilized using traditional bulk…

We derive first-order (in the stepsize) bounds on the bias in Wasserstein distances of the invariant measure of stochastic gradient kinetic Langevin dynamics with minimal assumptions on the stochastic gradient noise. These bounds sharpen…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Optimal Transport has sparked vivid interest in recent years, in particular thanks to the Wasserstein distance, which provides a geometrically sensible and intuitive way of comparing probability measures. For computational reasons, the…

Minimizing the inclusive Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is challenging since its gradient is defined as an integral over the posterior. Recently, multiple methods have been proposed to run SGD with…

We study online inference and asymptotic covariance estimation for the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. While classical methods (such as plug-in and batch-means estimators) are available, they either require inaccessible…

Stein discrepancies have emerged as a powerful statistical tool, being applied to fundamental statistical problems including parameter inference, goodness-of-fit testing, and sampling. The canonical Stein discrepancies require the…

This paper studies the optimization of the KL functional on the Wasserstein space of probability measures, and develops a sampling framework based on Wasserstein gradient descent (WGD). We identify two important subclasses of the…