Related papers: Distributionally Constrained Black-Box Stochastic …
This paper focus on investigating the distributed Riemannian stochastic optimization problem on the Stiefel manifold for multi-agent systems, where all the agents work collaboratively to optimize a function modeled by the average of their…
In this paper, we study the standard formulation of an optimization problem when the computation of gradient is not available. Such a problem can be classified as a "black box" optimization problem, since the oracle returns only the value…
Decentralized solutions to finite-sum minimization are of significant importance in many signal processing, control, and machine learning applications. In such settings, the data is distributed over a network of arbitrarily-connected nodes…
We consider a zeroth-order distributed optimization problem, where the global objective function is a black-box function and, as such, its gradient information is inaccessible to the local agents. Instead, the local agents can only use the…
Stochastic convex optimization algorithms are the most popular way to train machine learning models on large-scale data. Scaling up the training process of these models is crucial, but the most popular algorithm, Stochastic Gradient Descent…
Natural gradient methods have been used to optimise the parameters of probability distributions in a variety of settings, often resulting in fast-converging procedures. Unfortunately, for many distributions of interest, computing the…
Given the limitations of backpropagation, perturbation-based gradient computation methods have recently gained focus for learning with only forward passes, also referred to as queries. Conventional forward learning consumes enormous queries…
This paper tackles the challenge of parameter calibration in stochastic models, particularly in scenarios where the likelihood function is unavailable in an analytical form. We introduce a gradient-based simulated parameter estimation…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
We consider stochastic optimization when one only has access to biased stochastic oracles of the objective and the gradient, and obtaining stochastic gradients with low biases comes at high costs. This setting captures various optimization…
We introduce a new, high-throughput, synchronous, distributed, data-parallel, stochastic-gradient-descent learning algorithm. This algorithm uses amortized inference in a compute-cluster-specific, deep, generative, dynamical model to…
To address the challenge of backpropagating the gradient through categorical variables, we propose the augment-REINFORCE-swap-merge (ARSM) gradient estimator that is unbiased and has low variance. ARSM first uses variable augmentation,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
We consider stochastic optimization with delayed gradients where, at each time step $t$, the algorithm makes an update using a stale stochastic gradient from step $t - d_t$ for some arbitrary delay $d_t$. This setting abstracts asynchronous…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of modern machine learning. Sometimes, there are many different potential gradient estimators that can be used. When so, choosing the one with the best tradeoff between cost and variance is…
This work presents the convergence rate analysis of stochastic variants of the broad class of direct-search methods of directional type. It introduces an algorithm designed to optimize differentiable objective functions $f$ whose values can…
We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…
In this work, we consider constrained stochastic optimization problems under hidden convexity, i.e., those that admit a convex reformulation via non-linear (but invertible) map $c(\cdot)$. A number of non-convex problems ranging from…
This paper considers the distributed smooth optimization problem in which the objective is to minimize a global cost function formed by a sum of local smooth cost functions, by using local information exchange. The standard assumption for…