Related papers: Utilising the CLT Structure in Stochastic Gradient…

An estimation problem of fundamental interest is that of phase synchronization, in which the goal is to recover a collection of phases using noisy measurements of relative phases. It is known that in the Gaussian noise setting, the maximum…

We consider the problem of finding nearly optimal solutions of optimization problems with random objective functions. Two concrete problems we consider are (a) optimizing the Hamiltonian of a spherical or Ising $p$-spin glass model, and (b)…

Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) are predominant approaches for solving stochastic optimization. On smooth nonconvex problems, a few acceleration techniques have been applied to improve the convergence rate of SGMs. However, little…

In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…

Modern supervised learning techniques, particularly those using deep nets, involve fitting high dimensional labelled data sets with functions containing very large numbers of parameters. Much of this work is empirical. Interesting phenomena…

As models for nature language processing (NLP), computer vision (CV) and recommendation systems (RS) require surging computation, a large number of GPUs/TPUs are paralleled as a large batch (LB) to improve training throughput. However,…

We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…

We propose a stochastic conditional gradient method (CGM) for minimizing convex finite-sum objectives formed as a sum of smooth and non-smooth terms. Existing CGM variants for this template either suffer from slow convergence rates, or…

We introduce a new method for obtaining quantitative convergence rates for the central limit theorem (CLT) in a high dimensional setting. Using our method, we obtain several new bounds for convergence in transportation distance and entropy,…

An important open problem is the theoretically feasible acceleration of mini-batch SGD-type algorithms on quadratic problems with power-law spectrum. In the non-stochastic setting, the optimal exponent $\xi$ in the loss convergence $L_t\sim…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is commonly modeled as a Langevin process, assuming that minibatch noise acts as Brownian motion. However, this approximation relies on a continuous-time limit and a sqrt(eta) noise scaling that does not…

We propose Decentralized Proximal Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (DE-PSGLD), a decentralized Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for sampling from a log-concave probability distribution constrained to a convex domain.…

Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…

In this paper, we study the convergence properties of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method for finding a stationary point of a given objective function $J(\cdot)$. The objective function is not required to be convex. Rather, our…

We reconsider randomized algorithms for the low-rank approximation of symmetric positive semi-definite (SPSD) matrices such as Laplacian and kernel matrices that arise in data analysis and machine learning applications. Our main results…

Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…

We consider stochastic optimization problems with the dual tasks of (i) effectively finding the optimizer and (ii) reliably conducting statistical inference for the optimal objective function value. We find that classical simulation…

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

Motivated by the increasingly popular Score-based Generative Modeling (SGM), we study the Inexact Langevin Dynamics (ILD) and Inexact Langevin Algorithm (ILA) where a score function estimate is used in place of the exact score. We establish…

The mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) is a nonlinear generalization of the Langevin dynamics that incorporates a distribution-dependent drift, and it naturally arises from the optimization of two-layer neural networks via (noisy) gradient…