Related papers: Conjugate Natural Selection
We study the sequential decision making problem of maximizing the expected total reward while satisfying a constraint on the expected total utility. We employ the natural policy gradient method to solve the discounted infinite-horizon…
Bandeira et al. (2022) introduced the Franz-Parisi (FP) criterion for characterizing the computational hard phases in statistical detection problems. The FP criterion, based on an annealed version of the celebrated Franz-Parisi potential…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
We consider machine learning tasks with low-rank functional tree tensor networks (TTN) as the learning model. While in the case of least-squares regression, low-rank functional TTNs can be efficiently optimized using alternating…
In federated distributed learning, the goal is to optimize a global training objective defined over distributed devices, where the data shard at each device is sampled from a possibly different distribution (a.k.a., heterogeneous or non…
We present a novel Natural Evolution Strategy (NES) variant, the Rank-One NES (R1-NES), which uses a low rank approximation of the search distribution covariance matrix. The algorithm allows computation of the natural gradient with cost…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…
Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a popular parallel optimization algorithm in machine learning. Most theoretical analysis on ASGD take a discrete view and prove upper bounds for their convergence rates. However, the…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…
A notion of quantum natural evolution strategies is introduced, which provides a geometric synthesis of a number of known quantum/classical algorithms for performing classical black-box optimization. Recent work of Gomes et al. [2019] on…
We study the problem of high-dimensional robust mean estimation in the presence of a constant fraction of adversarial outliers. A recent line of work has provided sophisticated polynomial-time algorithms for this problem with…
Gradient-based attribution methods are model-faithful and scalable, but Integrated Gradients (IG) can be brittle because explanations depend on heuristic baselines, straight-line paths, discretization, and saturation. We propose Fisher--Rao…
Modern data often arises with multiple modalities. For example, covariates and a network are observed on the same subjects, and both contain useful information. Effectively integrating these modalities is important and challenging,…
We consider solving a convex, possibly stochastic optimization problem over a randomly time-varying multi-agent network. Each agent has access to some local objective function, and it only has unbiased estimates of the gradients of the…
The proximal stochastic gradient method (PSGD) is one of the state-of-the-art approaches for stochastic composite-type problems. In contrast to its deterministic counterpart, PSGD has been found to have difficulties with the correct…
Bayesian computation plays an important role in modern machine learning and statistics to reason about uncertainty. A key computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to develop efficient techniques to approximate, or draw samples from…
This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…
Motivated by a wide variety of applications, ranging from stochastic optimization to dimension reduction through variable selection, the problem of estimating gradients accurately is of crucial importance in statistics and learning theory.…
In this paper, we revisit and improve the convergence of policy gradient (PG), natural PG (NPG) methods, and their variance-reduced variants, under general smooth policy parametrizations. More specifically, with the Fisher information…