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We address parameter estimation in second-order stochastic differential equations (SDEs), which are prevalent in physics, biology, and ecology. The second-order SDE is converted to a first-order system by introducing an auxiliary velocity…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-17 Predrag Pilipovic , Adeline Samson , Susanne Ditlevsen

Gradient flow in the 2-Wasserstein space is widely used to optimize functionals over probability distributions and is typically implemented using an interacting particle system with $n$ particles. Analyzing these algorithms requires showing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Chandan Tankala , Dheeraj M. Nagaraj , Anant Raj

The dual challenges of prohibitive communication overhead and the impracticality of gradient computation due to data privacy or black-box constraints in distributed systems motivate this work on communication-constrained gradient-free…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-19 Youqing Hua , Shuai Liu , Yiguang Hong , Wei Ren

Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Wanli Shi , Hongchang Gao , Bin Gu

Natural gradient descent is an optimization method traditionally motivated from the perspective of information geometry, and works well for many applications as an alternative to stochastic gradient descent. In this paper we critically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-22 James Martens

Feature selection (FS) has become an indispensable task in dealing with today's highly complex pattern recognition problems with massive number of features. In this study, we propose a new wrapper approach for FS based on binary…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-03-08 Vural Aksakalli , Milad Malekipirbazari

Our approach is part of the close link between continuous dissipative dynamical systems and optimization algorithms. We aim to solve convex minimization problems by means of stochastic inertial differential equations which are driven by the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-06 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Jalal Fadili , Hedy Attouch , Peter Ochs

This work considers the non-convex finite sum minimization problem. There are several algorithms for such problems, but existing methods often work poorly when the problem is badly scaled and/or ill-conditioned, and a primary goal of this…

This paper studies the complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point for stochastic bilevel optimization when the upper-level problem is nonconvex and the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent work proposed the first-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Lesi Chen , Junru Li , El Mahdi Chayti , Jingzhao Zhang

Approximate inference in probability models is a fundamental task in machine learning. Approximate inference provides powerful tools to Bayesian reasoning, decision making, and Bayesian deep learning. The main goal is to estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Jun Han

We investigate the problem of finding second-order stationary points (SOSP) in differentially private (DP) stochastic non-convex optimization. Existing methods suffer from two key limitations: (i) inaccurate convergence error rate due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Youming Tao , Zuyuan Zhang , Dongxiao Yu , Xiuzhen Cheng , Falko Dressler , Di Wang

Private optimization is a topic of major interest in machine learning, with differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) playing a key role in both theory and practice. Furthermore, DP-SGD is known to be a powerful tool in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Dmitrii Avdiukhin , Michael Dinitz , Chenglin Fan , Grigory Yaroslavtsev

We introduce a scheme for probabilistic hypocenter inversion with Stein variational inference. Our approach uses a differentiable forward model in the form of a physics informed neural network, which we train to solve the Eikonal equation.…

Geophysics · Physics 2022-08-18 Jonathan D. Smith , Zachary E. Ross , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Jack B. Muir

Statistical preconditioning enables fast methods for distributed large-scale empirical risk minimization problems. In this approach, multiple worker nodes compute gradients in parallel, which are then used by the central node to update the…

In this work, the Einstein notation is utilized to synthesize state and parameter transition matrices, by solving a set of ordinary differential equations. Additionally, for the system identification problem, it has been demonstrated that…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-07-08 Premjit Saha , Tarunraj Singh

We establish an optimal strong convergence rate of a fully discrete numerical scheme for second order parabolic stochastic partial differential equations with monotone drifts, including the stochastic Allen-Cahn equation, driven by an…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-05-21 Zhihui Liu , Zhonghua Qiao

Recent results suggest that quantum computers possess the potential to speed up nonconvex optimization problems. However, a crucial factor for the implementation of quantum optimization algorithms is their robustness against experimental…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-12-07 Weiyuan Gong , Chenyi Zhang , Tongyang Li

We develop a new algorithm for non-convex stochastic optimization that finds an $\epsilon$-critical point in the optimal $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector product computations. Our algorithm uses Hessian-vector…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Hoang Tran , Ashok Cutkosky

We use a rank one Gaussian perturbation to derive a smooth stochastic approximation of the maximum eigenvalue function. We then combine this smoothing result with an optimal smooth stochastic optimization algorithm to produce an efficient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-03-05 Alexandre d'Aspremont , Noureddine El Karoui

We study stochastic zeroth order gradient and Hessian estimators for real-valued functions in $\mathbb{R}^n$. We show that, via taking finite difference along random orthogonal directions, the variance of the stochastic finite difference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Yasong Feng , Tianyu Wang