Related papers: Regularized R\'enyi divergence minimization throug…
In this paper, we study the low-rank matrix minimization problem, where the loss function is convex but nonsmooth and the penalty term is defined by the cardinality function. We first introduce an exact continuous relaxation, that is, both…
This paper introduces a new proximal stochastic gradient method with variance reduction and stabilization for minimizing the sum of a convex stochastic function and a group sparsity-inducing regularization function. Since the method may be…
Black-Box Variational Inference (BBVI) typically relies on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to optimize the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). However, the stochastic gradients in BBVI inherently exhibit unbounded variance, violating standard…
Many core problems in robotics can be framed as constrained optimization problems. Often on these problems, the robotic system has uncertainty, or it would be advantageous to identify multiple high quality feasible solutions. To enable…
Regularized empirical risk minimization (R-ERM) is an important branch of machine learning, since it constrains the capacity of the hypothesis space and guarantees the generalization ability of the learning algorithm. Two classic proximal…
Bayesian methods are particularly effective for addressing inverse problems due to their ability to manage uncertainties inherent in the inference process. However, employing these methods with costly forward models poses significant…
For approximating a target distribution given only its unnormalized log-density, stochastic gradient-based variational inference (VI) algorithms are a popular approach. For example, Wasserstein VI (WVI) and black-box VI (BBVI) perform…
Block majorization-minimization (BMM) is a simple iterative algorithm for nonconvex optimization that sequentially minimizes a majorizing surrogate of the objective function in each block coordinate while the other block coordinates are…
We propose and analyze several stochastic gradient algorithms for finding stationary points or local minimum in nonconvex, possibly with nonsmooth regularizer, finite-sum and online optimization problems. First, we propose a simple proximal…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal…
Recent progress in center-based clustering algorithms combats poor local minima by implicit annealing, using a family of generalized means. These methods are variations of Lloyd's celebrated $k$-means algorithm, and are most appropriate for…
We develop a Bregman proximal gradient method for structure learning on linear structural causal models. While the problem is non-convex, has high curvature and is in fact NP-hard, Bregman gradient methods allow us to neutralize at least…
Bregman proximal-type algorithms (BPs), such as mirror descent, have become popular tools in machine learning and data science for exploiting problem structures through non-Euclidean geometries. In this paper, we show that BPs can get…
We study black-box auditing for machine learning algorithms that claim R \ 'enyi differential privacy (RDP) guarantees. We introduce an auditing framework, based on hypothesis testing, that directly estimates R\'enyi divergence between…
This paper presents a novel stochastic optimisation methodology to perform empirical Bayesian inference in semi-blind image deconvolution problems. Given a blurred image and a parametric class of possible operators, the proposed…
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.…
We develop EigenVI, an eigenvalue-based approach for black-box variational inference (BBVI). EigenVI constructs its variational approximations from orthogonal function expansions. For distributions over $\mathbb{R}^D$, the lowest order term…
The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has been studied for years. The traditional ADMM algorithm needs to compute, at each iteration, an (empirical) expected loss function on all training examples, resulting in a…
Variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods have gained popularity in recent times. Several variants exist with different strategies for the storing and sampling of gradients and this work concerns the interactions between these two…
This paper considers a stochastic optimization problem over the fixed point sets of quasinonexpansive mappings on Riemannian manifolds. The problem enables us to consider Riemannian hierarchical optimization problems over complicated sets,…