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Latent variable models are powerful tools for modeling complex phenomena involving in particular partially observed data, unobserved variables or underlying complex unknown structures. Inference is often difficult due to the latent…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-06-23 Charlotte Baey , Maud Delattre , Estelle Kuhn , Jean-Benoist Leger , Sarah Lemler

Variance reduction is a family of powerful mechanisms for stochastic optimization that appears to be helpful in many machine learning tasks. It is based on estimating the exact gradient with some recursive sequences. Previously, many papers…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-07 Aleksandr Shestakov , Valery Parfenov , Aleksandr Beznosikov

We consider the problem of sequentially choosing between a set of unbiased Monte Carlo estimators to minimize the mean-squared-error (MSE) of a final combined estimate. By reducing this task to a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-05-15 James Neufeld , András György , Dale Schuurmans , Csaba Szepesvári

Implicit bias induced by gradient-based algorithms is essential to the generalization of overparameterized models, yet its mechanisms can be subtle. This work leverages the Normalized Steepest Descent} (NSD) framework to investigate how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Shengping Xie , Zekun Wu , Quan Chen , Kaixu Tang

In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-15 Xiaopeng Luo , Xin Xu

The study of optimal control problems under uncertainty plays an important role in scientific numerical simulations. This class of optimization problems is strongly utilized in engineering, biology and finance. In this paper, a stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-06 Caroline Geiersbach , Teresa Scarinci

Recently a machine learning approach to Monte-Carlo simulations called Neural Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (NMCMC) is gaining traction. In its most popular form it uses neural networks to construct normalizing flows which are then trained to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-01 Piotr Bialas , Piotr Korcyl , Tomasz Stebel

In this paper, we describe a new way to get convergence rates for optimal methods in smooth (strongly) convex optimization tasks. Our approach is based on results for tasks where gradients have nonrandom small noises. Unlike previous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-14 Darina Dvinskikh , Alexander Tyurin , Alexander Gasnikov , Sergey Omelchenko

Wasserstein distributionally robust optimization offers a framework for model fitting in machine learning under potential shifts in the data distribution. We study a regularized variant of this problem in which entropic smoothing produces a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Tam Le

We study the existence of algorithms generating almost surely nonnegative unbiased estimators. We show that given a nonconstant real-valued function $f$ and a sequence of unbiased estimators of $\lambda\in\mathbb{R}$, there is no algorithm…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-04-02 Pierre E. Jacob , Alexandre H. Thiery

Stochastic optimization lies at the core of most statistical learning models. The recent great development of stochastic algorithmic tools focused significantly onto proximal gradient iterations, in order to find an efficient approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-31 Andrei Patrascu , Ciprian Paduraru , Paul Irofti

Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Hoang Phuc Hau Luu , Hanlin Yu , Bernardo Williams , Marcelo Hartmann , Arto Klami

We propose an online parametric estimation method of stochastic differential equations with discrete observations and misspecified modelling based on online gradient descent. Our study provides uniform upper bounds for the risks of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-18 Shogo Nakakita

Nested integration problems arise in various scientific and engineering applications, including Bayesian experimental design, financial risk assessment, and uncertainty quantification. These nested integrals take the form $\int f\left(\int…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-06-17 Arved Bartuska , André Gustavo Carlon , Luis Espath , Sebastian Krumscheid , Raúl Tempone

We study the problem of estimating low-rank matrices from linear measurements (a.k.a., matrix sensing) through nonconvex optimization. We propose an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve a nonconvex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-01-17 Xiao Zhang , Lingxiao Wang , Quanquan Gu

We consider the problem of estimating expectations with respect to a target distribution with an unknown normalizing constant, and where even the unnormalized target needs to be approximated at finite resolution. This setting is ubiquitous…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-03-23 Kody J. H. Law , Neil Walton , Shangda Yang , Ajay Jasra

This paper provides a unifying theoretical framework for stochastic optimization algorithms by means of a latent stochastic variational problem. Using techniques from stochastic control, the solution to the variational problem is shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Philippe Casgrain

We propose a new unbiased estimator for estimating the utility of the optimal stopping problem. The MUSE, short for Multilevel Unbiased Stopping Estimator, constructs the unbiased Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) estimator at every stage of…

Computation · Statistics 2022-12-29 Zhengqing Zhou , Guanyang Wang , Jose Blanchet , Peter W. Glynn

In this study, we consider an optimization problem with uncertainty dependent on decision variables, which has recently attracted attention due to its importance in machine learning and pricing applications. In this problem, the gradient of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-31 Yuya Hikima , Akiko Takeda

We propose randomized subspace gradient methods for high-dimensional constrained optimization. While there have been similarly purposed studies on unconstrained optimization problems, there have been few on constrained optimization problems…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-10 Ryota Nozawa , Pierre-Louis Poirion , Akiko Takeda