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Generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) are a widely used tool in statistical analysis. The main bottleneck of many computational approaches lies in the inversion of the high dimensional precision matrices associated with the random…

Computation · Statistics 2025-10-08 Andrea Pandolfi , Omiros Papaspiliopoulos , Giacomo Zanella

Uncertainty estimation in large deep-learning models is a computationally challenging task, where it is difficult to form even a Gaussian approximation to the posterior distribution. In such situations, existing methods usually resort to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-15 Aaron Mishkin , Frederik Kunstner , Didrik Nielsen , Mark Schmidt , Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan

We evaluate natural gradient, an algorithm originally proposed in Amari (1997), for learning deep models. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We show the connection between natural gradient and three other recently proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-18 Razvan Pascanu , Yoshua Bengio

Distributional regression is extended to Gaussian response vectors of dimension greater than two by parameterizing the covariance matrix $\Sigma$ of the response distribution using the entries of its Cholesky decomposition. The more common…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-07 Thomas Muschinski , Georg J. Mayr , Thorsten Simon , Nikolaus Umlauf , Achim Zeileis

Hierarchical Gaussian Filtering (HGF) networks allow for efficient updating of posterior distributions (beliefs) about hidden states of an agent's environment. HGF parent nodes can target the mean or variance of their children. New…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Christoph Mathys , Nicolas Legrand , Peter Thestrup Waade , Nace Mikus , Lilian Aline Weber

This paper introduces a new stochastic optimization method based on the regularized Fisher information matrix (FIM), named SOFIM, which can efficiently utilize the FIM to approximate the Hessian matrix for finding Newton's gradient update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Mrinmay Sen , A. K. Qin , Gayathri C , Raghu Kishore N , Yen-Wei Chen , Balasubramanian Raman

Modern statistical inference tasks often require iterative optimization methods to compute the solution. Convergence analysis from an optimization viewpoint only informs us how well the solution is approximated numerically but overlooks the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-27 Tengyuan Liang , Weijie Su

Accurate state estimation for robotic systems evolving on Lie group manifolds, such as legged robots, is a prerequisite for achieving agile control. However, this task is challenged by nonlinear observation models defined on curved…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Tianyi Zhang , Wenhan Cao , Chang Liu , Yao Lyu , Shengbo Eben Li

Fisher information and natural gradient provided deep insights and powerful tools to artificial neural networks. However related analysis becomes more and more difficult as the learner's structure turns large and complex. This paper makes a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-21 Ke Sun , Frank Nielsen

Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-03 Yufeng Yang , Erin Tripp , Yifan Sun , Shaofeng Zou , Yi Zhou

Bayesian inference has many advantages for complex models, but standard Monte Carlo methods for summarizing the posterior can be computationally demanding, and it is attractive to consider optimization-based variational methods. Our work…

Computation · Statistics 2025-10-09 Aoxiang Chen , David J. Nott , Linda S. L. Tan

In a real Hilbert space setting, we study the convergence properties of an inexact gradient algorithm featuring both viscous and Hessian driven damping for convex differentiable optimization. In this algorithm, the gradient evaluation can…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-25 Harsh Choudhary , Jalal Fadili , Vyachelav Kungurtsev

Smoothness of the subdiagonals of the Cholesky factor of large covariance matrices is closely related to the degrees of nonstationarity of autoregressive models for time series and longitudinal data. Heuristically, one expects for a nearly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-23 Aramayis Dallakyan , Mohsen Pourahmadi

Gaussian variational approximation is a popular methodology to approximate posterior distributions in Bayesian inference especially in high dimensional and large data settings. To control the computational cost while being able to capture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Bingxin Zhou , Junbin Gao , Minh-Ngoc Tran , Richard Gerlach

Natural gradient descent (NGD) provided deep insights and powerful tools to deep neural networks. However the computation of Fisher information matrix becomes more and more difficult as the network structure turns large and complex. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Weihua Liu , Xiabi Liu

Stochastic gradient algorithms are the main focus of large-scale optimization problems and led to important successes in the recent advancement of the deep learning algorithms. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Caglar Gulcehre , Jose Sotelo , Marcin Moczulski , Yoshua Bengio

A novel adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm is presented. The algorithm utilizes sparsity in the partial correlation structure of a density to efficiently estimate the covariance matrix through the Cholesky factor of the precision…

Computation · Statistics 2016-02-09 Jonas Wallin , David Bolin

Natural gradients have been widely used in optimization of loss functionals over probability space, with important examples such as Fisher-Rao gradient descent for Kullback-Leibler divergence, Wasserstein gradient descent for…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Lexing Ying

Stochastic gradient optimization is the dominant learning paradigm for a variety of scenarios, from classical supervised learning to modern self-supervised learning. We consider stochastic gradient algorithms for learning problems whose…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-29 Facheng Yu , Ronak Mehta , Alex Luedtke , Zaid Harchaoui

In many applications, data come with a natural ordering. This ordering can often induce local dependence among nearby variables. However, in complex data, the width of this dependence may vary, making simple assumptions such as a constant…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-12-11 Guo Yu , Jacob Bien