Related papers: Generalizing Gaussian Smoothing for Random Search

An exciting branch of machine learning research focuses on methods for learning, optimizing, and integrating unknown functions that are difficult or costly to evaluate. A popular Bayesian approach to this problem uses a Gaussian process…

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…

Consider a linear regression model where the design matrix X has n rows and p columns. We assume (a) p is much large than n, (b) the coefficient vector beta is sparse in the sense that only a small fraction of its coordinates is nonzero,…

We study the distributed stochastic optimization (DSO) problem under a heavy-tailed noise condition by utilizing a multi-agent system. Despite the extensive research on DSO algorithms used to solve DSO problems under light-tailed noise…

Thompson sampling (TS) is a simple, effective stochastic policy in Bayesian decision making. It samples the posterior belief about the reward profile and optimizes the sample to obtain a candidate decision. In continuous optimization, the…

This work presents GS-DOT, a novel image reconstruction framework based on Gaussian Splatting (GS) for diffuse optical tomography (DOT). Inspired by GS for rendering applications, absorption coefficients are represented as a sparse sum of…

One of the most common methods to train machine learning algorithms today is the stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In a distributed setting, SGD-based algorithms have been shown to converge theoretically under specific circumstances. A…

Gaussian Splatting (GS) is a novel, state-of-the-art technique for rendering points in a 3D scene by approximating their contribution to image pixels through Gaussian distributions, warranting fast training and real-time rendering. The main…

We introduce a general framework for nonlinear stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for the scenarios when gradient noise exhibits heavy tails. The proposed framework subsumes several popular nonlinearity choices, like clipped, normalized,…

Derivative-free optimization (DFO) is the mathematical study of the optimization algorithms that do not use derivatives. One branch of DFO focuses on model-based DFO methods, where an approximation of the objective function is used to guide…

Kernel smoothing is a widely used nonparametric method in modern statistical analysis. The problem of efficiently conducting kernel smoothing for a massive dataset on a distributed system is a problem of great importance. In this work, we…

Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a probabilistic nonparametric representation of functions in regression, classification, and other problems. Unfortunately, exact learning with GPs is intractable for large datasets. A variety of approximate…

What enables Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to achieve better generalization than Gradient Descent (GD) in Neural Network training? This question has attracted much attention. In this paper, we study the distribution of the Stochastic…

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become a competitive approach for novel view synthesis (NVS) due to its advanced rendering efficiency through 3D Gaussian projection and blending. However, Gaussians are treated equally weighted for…

The paper considers distributed gradient flow (DGF) for multi-agent nonconvex optimization. DGF is a continuous-time approximation of distributed gradient descent that is often easier to study than its discrete-time counterpart. The paper…

This article focuses on a class of distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems where, unlike the growing body of the literature, the objective function is potentially nonlinear in the distribution. Existing methods to optimize…

We investigate unbiased high-dimensional mean estimators in differential privacy. We consider differentially private mechanisms whose expected output equals the mean of the input dataset, for every dataset drawn from a fixed bounded…

Gaussian processes provide a compact representation for modeling and estimating an unknown function, that can be updated as new measurements of the function are obtained. This paper extends this powerful framework to the case where the…

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…

This paper proposes a random subspace trust-region algorithm for general convex-constrained derivative-free optimization (DFO) problems. Similar to previous random subspace DFO methods, the convergence of our algorithm requires a certain…