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Practitioners of Bayesian statistics have long depended on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain samples from intractable posterior distributions. Unfortunately, MCMC algorithms are typically serial, and do not scale to the large…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-11 Maxim Rabinovich , Elaine Angelino , Michael I. Jordan

An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Albert S. Berahas , Frank E. Curtis , Lara Zebiane

In order to solve tasks like uncertainty quantification or hypothesis tests in Bayesian imaging inverse problems, we often have to draw samples from the arising posterior distribution. For the usually log-concave but high-dimensional…

Computation · Statistics 2025-01-23 Matthias J. Ehrhardt , Lorenz Kuger , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

Sampling from a lattice Gaussian distribution is emerging as an important problem in various areas such as coding and cryptography. The default sampling algorithm --- Klein's algorithm yields a distribution close to the lattice Gaussian…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-11-18 Zheng Wang , Cong Ling , Guillaume Hanrot

Science and engineering problems subject to uncertainty are frequently both computationally expensive and feature nonsmooth parameter dependence, making standard Monte Carlo too slow, and excluding efficient use of accelerated uncertainty…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-10-01 Per Pettersson , Sebastian Krumscheid

Markov chain Monte Carlo is a class of algorithms for drawing Markovian samples from high-dimensional target densities to approximate the numerical integration associated with computing statistical expectation, especially in Bayesian…

Computation · Statistics 2018-03-28 Khoa T. Tran

Reducing acquisition time is of fundamental importance in various imaging modalities. The concept of variable density sampling provides a nice framework to achieve this. It was justified recently from a theoretical point of view in the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-01-29 Claire Boyer , Pierre Weiss , Jérémie Bigot

We present an optimization algorithm that can identify a global minimum of a potentially nonconvex smooth function with high probability, assuming the Gibbs measure of the potential satisfies a logarithmic Sobolev inequality. Our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Daniel Cortild , Claire Delplancke , Nadia Oudjane , Juan Peypouquet

We consider the problem of approximating an unknown function from point evaluations. This problem is a crucial subproblem in many modern (nonlinear) approximation schemes. When obtaining these point evaluations is costly, minimising the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-12-03 Philipp Trunschke , Anthony Nouy

In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-08 Szymon Majewski , Błażej Miasojedow , Eric Moulines

This paper addresses stochastic optimization of Lipschitz-continuous, nonsmooth and nonconvex objectives over compact convex sets, where only noisy function evaluations are available. While gradient-free methods have been developed for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Anik Kumar Paul , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Sampling from distributions play a crucial role in aiding practitioners with statistical inference. However, in numerous situations, obtaining exact samples from complex distributions is infeasible. Consequently, researchers often turn to…

Computation · Statistics 2024-04-01 Riddhiman Bhattacharya , Tiefeng Jiang

Segmenting images of low quality or with missing data is a challenging problem. Integrating statistical prior information about the shapes to be segmented can improve the segmentation results significantly. Most shape-based segmentation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2016-11-14 Ertunc Erdil , Sinan Yıldırım , Müjdat Çetin , Tolga Taşdizen

This paper introduces a smoothed proximal Lagrangian method for minimizing a nonconvex smooth function over a convex domain with additional explicit convex nonlinear constraints. Two key features are 1) the proposed method is single-looped,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-28 Wenqiang Pu , Kaizhao Sun , Jiawei Zhang

We consider the task of MCMC sampling from a distribution defined on a discrete space. Building on recent insights provided in [Zan19], we devise a class of efficient continuous-time, non-reversible algorithms which make active use of the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-12-19 Samuel Power , Jacob Vorstrup Goldman

Bayesian model selection provides a powerful framework for objectively comparing models directly from observed data, without reference to ground truth data. However, Bayesian model selection requires the computation of the marginal…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-17 Xiaohao Cai , Jason D. McEwen , Marcelo Pereyra

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-21 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysios S. Kalogerias

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) is a Markov chain algorithm for sampling from a high-dimensional distribution with density $e^{-f(x)}$, given access to the gradient of $f$. A particular case of interest is that of a $d$-dimensional Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-27 Simon Apers , Sander Gribling , Dániel Szilágyi

In this paper, we discuss the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: a smooth function plus a non-smooth function. Further, the smooth part can be expressed by the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-17 Luo Luo , Zihao Chen , Zhihua Zhang , Wu-Jun Li

This paper considers the robust phase retrieval problem, which can be cast as a nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization problem. We propose a new inexact proximal linear algorithm with the subproblem being solved inexactly. Our contributions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-12 Zhong Zheng , Shiqian Ma , Lingzhou Xue