English
Related papers

Related papers: Regularized Stein Variational Gradient Flow

200 papers

We give quantitative estimates for the rate of convergence of Riemannian stochastic gradient descent (RSGD) to Riemannian gradient flow and to a diffusion process, the so-called Riemannian stochastic modified flow (RSMF). Using tools from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Benjamin Gess , Sebastian Kassing , Nimit Rana

The Stochastic Gradient Descent method (SGD) and its stochastic variants have become methods of choice for solving finite-sum optimization problems arising from machine learning and data science thanks to their ability to handle large-scale…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-06 Trang H. Tran , Quoc Tran-Dinh , Lam M. Nguyen

In this work, we propose a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) framework to design data-driven policy gradient descent algorithms for the linear quadratic regulator problem. Two alternative schemes are considered to estimate the policy…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-24 Bowen Song , Simon Weissmann , Mathias Staudigl , Andrea Iannelli

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants form the backbone of deep learning optimization, yet the underlying dynamics of their gradient behavior remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we reinterpret gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Zhipeng Yao , Rui Yu , Guisong Chang , Ying Li , Yu Zhang , Dazhou Li

We introduce adaptive, tuning-free step size schedules for gradient-based sampling algorithms obtained as time-discretizations of Wasserstein gradient flows. The result is a suite of tuning-free sampling algorithms, including tuning-free…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-30 Louis Sharrock , Christopher Nemeth

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely believed to perform implicit regularization when used to train deep neural networks, but the precise manner in which this occurs has thus far been elusive. We prove that SGD minimizes an average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-17 Pratik Chaudhari , Stefano Soatto

Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-17 Mengdi Wang , Ethan X. Fang , Han Liu

Particle-optimization-based sampling (POS) is a recently developed effective sampling technique that interactively updates a set of particles. A representative algorithm is the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). We prove, under…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-31 Jianyi Zhang , Ruiyi Zhang , Lawrence Carin , Changyou Chen

In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-14 Kangqiao Liu , Liu Ziyin , Masahito Ueda

We analyze in a closed form the learning dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for a single-layer neural network classifying a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture where each cluster is assigned one of two labels. This problem provides…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-28 Francesca Mignacco , Florent Krzakala , Pierfrancesco Urbani , Lenka Zdeborová

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for minimizing objective functions that arise in machine learning. For constant step-sized SGD, the iterates form a Markov chain on a general state space. Focusing on a class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-26 David Shirokoff , Philip Zaleski

Gradient normalization and soft clipping are two popular techniques for tackling instability issues and improving convergence of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum. In this article, we study these types of methods through the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Måns Williamson , Tony Stillfjord

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Da Li , Jingjing Wu , Qingrun Zhang

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an out-of-equilibrium algorithm used extensively to train artificial neural networks. However very little is known on to what extent SGD is crucial for to the success of this technology and, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Persia Jana Kamali , Pierfrancesco Urbani

In this paper we introduce a unified analysis of a large family of variants of proximal stochastic gradient descent ({\tt SGD}) which so far have required different intuitions, convergence analyses, have different applications, and which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-28 Eduard Gorbunov , Filip Hanzely , Peter Richtárik

Policy gradient methods have been successfully applied to many complex reinforcement learning problems. However, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance, slow convergence, and inefficient exploration. In this work, we introduce a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-11 Yang Liu , Prajit Ramachandran , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

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

We introduce a (de)-regularization of the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (DrMMD) and its Wasserstein gradient flow. Existing gradient flows that transport samples from source distribution to target distribution with only target samples, either…

This paper proposes a thorough theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with non-increasing step sizes. First, we show that the recursion defining SGD can be provably approximated by solutions of a time inhomogeneous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-02 Xavier Fontaine , Valentin De Bortoli , Alain Durmus

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a simple and efficient way to solve a broad range of machine learning problems. Here, we focus on distribution regression (DR), involving two stages of sampling: Firstly, we regress from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-08 Nicole Mücke