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We present differentially private (DP) algorithms for bilevel optimization, a problem class that received significant attention lately in various machine learning applications. These are the first algorithms for such problems under standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Guy Kornowski

Many numerical and learning algorithms rely on the solution of the Monge-Kantorovich problem and Wasserstein distances, which provide appropriate distributional metrics. While the natural approach is to treat the problem as an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-11 Mohsen Sadr , Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani , Hossein Gorji

Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms appear to be the most promising approach for near-term quantum applications. An important bottleneck is the classical optimization loop, where the multiple local minima and the emergence of barren…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-10-23 Ioannis Kolotouros , Petros Wallden

In this paper, a modification to the Gradient Sampling (GS) method for minimizing nonsmooth nonconvex functions is presented. One drawback in GS method is the need of solving a Quadratic optimization Problem (QP) at each iteration, which is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-03 M. Maleknia , M. Shamsi

A nonlinear diffusion equation, interpreted as a Wasserstein gradient flow, is numerically solved in one space dimension using a higher-order minimizing movement scheme based on the BDF (backward differentiation formula) discretization. In…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-09-02 Bertram Düring , Philipp Fuchs , Ansgar Jüngel

The squared Wasserstein distance is a natural quantity to compare probability distributions in a non-parametric setting. This quantity is usually estimated with the plug-in estimator, defined via a discrete optimal transport problem which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-30 Lenaic Chizat , Pierre Roussillon , Flavien Léger , François-Xavier Vialard , Gabriel Peyré

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-28 Jonathan So , Richard E. Turner

In this paper, we present an adaptive gradient descent method for geodesically convex optimization on a Riemannian manifold with nonnegative sectional curvature. The method automatically adapts to the local geometry of the function and does…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Aban Ansari-Önnestam , Yura Malitsky

Partial Differential Equation (PDE)-constrained optimization problems often take the form of an optimization of an objective function given as a sum of loss terms. Each function or gradient evaluation requires one or more PDE solves, which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Cash Cherry , Samy Wu Fung , Luis Tenorio , Ebru Bozdağ

While there has been a significant amount of work studying gradient descent techniques for non-convex optimization problems over the last few years, all existing results establish either local convergence with good rates or global…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-03-10 Prateek Jain , Chi Jin , Sham M. Kakade , Praneeth Netrapalli

Subspace learning and matrix factorization problems have great many applications in science and engineering, and efficient algorithms are critical as dataset sizes continue to grow. Many relevant problem formulations are non-convex, and in…

Numerical Analysis · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Dejiao Zhang , Laura Balzano

Local optimization presents a promising approach to expensive, high-dimensional black-box optimization by sidestepping the need to globally explore the search space. For objective functions whose gradient cannot be evaluated directly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Quan Nguyen , Kaiwen Wu , Jacob R. Gardner , Roman Garnett

We describe novel subgradient methods for a broad class of matrix optimization problems involving nuclear norm regularization. Unlike existing approaches, our method executes very cheap iterations by combining low-rank stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Haim Avron , Satyen Kale , Shiva Kasiviswanathan , Vikas Sindhwani

We study a natural Wasserstein gradient flow on manifolds of probability distributions with discrete sample spaces. We derive the Riemannian structure for the probability simplex from the dynamical formulation of the Wasserstein distance on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-19 Wuchen Li , Guido Montufar

Approximate Natural Gradient Descent (NGD) methods are an important family of optimisers for deep learning models, which use approximate Fisher information matrices to pre-condition gradients during training. The empirical Fisher (EF)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Xiaodong Wu , Wenyi Yu , Chao Zhang , Philip Woodland

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence plays a central role in probabilistic machine learning, where it commonly serves as the canonical loss function. Optimization in such settings is often performed over the probability simplex, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Adwait Datar , Nihat Ay

Selecting an effective step-size is a fundamental challenge in first-order optimization, especially for problems with non-Euclidean geometries. This paper presents a novel adaptive step-size strategy for optimization algorithms that rely on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Abbas Khademi , Antonio Silveti-Falls

Gradient methods are widely used in optimization problems. In practice, while the smoothness parameter can be estimated utilizing techniques such as backtracking, estimating the strong convexity parameter remains a challenge; moreover, even…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-17 Xiaozhe Hu , Sara Pollock , Zhongqin Xue , Yunrong Zhu

The natural gradient method is widely used in statistical optimization, but its standard formulation assumes a Euclidean parameter space. This paper proposes an inversion-free stochastic natural gradient method for probability distributions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-06 Dario Draca , Takuo Matsubara , Minh-Ngoc Tran

This article details a novel numerical scheme to approximate gradient flows for optimal transport (i.e. Wasserstein) metrics. These flows have proved useful to tackle theoretically and numerically non-linear diffusion equations that model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-03-10 Gabriel Peyré