Related papers: Global Optimization via Schr{\"o}dinger-F{\"o}llme…
We revisit the classical problem of estimating an unknown distribution from its samples by fitting a mixture model that minimizes cross-entropy loss. Framing the task as a stochastic convex optimization problem over the space of $ M…
We propose a new discretization of the mirror-Langevin diffusion and give a crisp proof of its convergence. Our analysis uses relative convexity/smoothness and self-concordance, ideas which originated in convex optimization, together with a…
Global optimization of black-box functions from noisy samples is a fundamental challenge in machine learning and scientific computing. Traditional methods such as Bayesian Optimization often converge to local minima on multi-modal…
Obtaining solutions to Optimal Transportation (OT) problems is typically intractable when the marginal spaces are continuous. Recent research has focused on approximating continuous solutions with discretization methods based on i.i.d.…
We consider the problem of function approximation by two-layer neural nets with random weights that are "nearly Gaussian" in the sense of Kullback-Leibler divergence. Our setting is the mean-field limit, where the finite population of…
The paper deals with a well-known extremum seeking scheme by proving uniformity properties with respect to the amplitudes of the dither signal and of the cost function. Those properties are then used to show that the scheme guarantees the…
Consider the global optimisation of a function $U$ defined on a finite set $V$ endowed with an irreducible and reversible Markov generator.By integration, we extend $U$ to the set $\mathcal{P}(V)$ of probability distributions on $V$ and we…
This paper establishes a strict mathematical relationship between an arbitrary continuous function on a compact set and its global minima, like the well-known first order optimality condition for convex and differentiable functions. By…
We present a new approach for computing approximate global minimizers to a large class of non-local pairwise interaction problems defined over probability distributions. The approach predicts candidate global minimizers, with a recovery…
This paper presents an algorithm to solve the Soft k-Means problem globally. Unlike Fuzzy c-Means, Soft k-Means (SkM) has a matrix factorization-type objective and has been shown to have a close relation with the popular probability…
This paper proposes a distributed stochastic projection-free algorithm for large-scale constrained finite-sum optimization whose constraint set is complicated such that the projection onto the constraint set can be expensive. The global…
We prove that the finite-difference based derivative-free descent (FD-DFD) methods have a capability to find the global minima for a class of multiple minima problems. Our main result shows that, for a class of multiple minima objectives…
We develop a new primitive for stochastic optimization: a low-bias, low-cost estimator of the minimizer $x_\star$ of any Lipschitz strongly-convex function. In particular, we use a multilevel Monte-Carlo approach due to Blanchet and Glynn…
We study the problem of unbiased estimation of expectations with respect to (w.r.t.) $\pi$ a given, general probability measure on $(\mathbb{R}^d,\mathcal{B}(\mathbb{R}^d))$ that is absolutely continuous with respect to a standard Gaussian…
We propose a method for sampling from Gibbs distributions of the form $\pi(x)\propto\exp(-U(x))$ by considering a family $(\pi^{t})_t$ of approximations of the target density which is such that $\pi^{t}$ exhibits favorable properties for…
We introduce a derivative-free global optimization algorithm that efficiently computes minima for various classes of one-dimensional functions, including non-convex, and non-smooth functions.This algorithm numerically approximates the…
We consider the problem of reconstructing an unknown function $u\in L^2(D,\mu)$ from its evaluations at given sampling points $x^1,\dots,x^m\in D$, where $D\subset \mathbb R^d$ is a general domain and $\mu$ a probability measure. The…
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…
Denoising diffusion models (DDMs) offer a flexible framework for sampling from high dimensional data distributions. DDMs generate a path of probability distributions interpolating between a reference Gaussian distribution and a data…
We present a new algorithm to optimize distributions defined implicitly by parameterized stochastic diffusions. Doing so allows us to modify the outcome distribution of sampling processes by optimizing over their parameters. We introduce a…