Related papers: Generalized Simultaneous Perturbation-based Gradie…

In a variety of problems originating in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, the loss function is defined by an expectation over a collection of random variables, which might be part of a probabilistic model or the external…

Structured sparsity is an important modeling tool that expands the applicability of convex formulations for data analysis, however it also creates significant challenges for efficient algorithm design. In this paper we investigate the…

Feature selection (FS) has become an indispensable task in dealing with today's highly complex pattern recognition problems with massive number of features. In this study, we propose a new wrapper approach for FS based on binary…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…

Deep neural networks (DNN) are typically optimized using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the estimation of the gradient using stochastic samples tends to be noisy and unreliable, resulting in large gradient variance and bad…

In this paper, we report the development of the generalized proximal smoothing (GPS) algorithm for phase retrieval of noisy data. GPS is a optimization-based algorithm, in which we relax both the Fourier magnitudes and object constraints.…

It has been observed in a variety of contexts that gradient descent methods have great success in solving low-rank matrix factorization problems, despite the relevant problem formulation being non-convex. We tackle a particular instance of…

Distributed descent-based methods are an essential toolset to solving optimization problems in multi-agent system scenarios. Here the agents seek to optimize a global objective function through mutual cooperation. Oftentimes, cooperation is…

We study the use of gradient descent with backtracking line search (GD-BLS) to solve the noisy optimization problem $\theta_\star:=\mathrm{argmin}_{\theta\in\mathbb{R}^d} \mathbb{E}[f(\theta,Z)]$, imposing that the function…

This manuscript presents the following: (1) an improved version of the Binary Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA) Method for feature selection in machine learning (Aksakalli and Malekipirbazari, Pattern Recognition…

The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…

In sparse Bayesian learning (SBL), Gaussian scale mixtures (GSMs) have been used to model sparsity-inducing priors that realize a class of concave penalty functions for the regression task in real-valued signal models. Motivated by the…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a widely deployed optimization procedure throughout data-driven and simulation-driven disciplines, which has drawn a substantial interest in understanding its global behavior across a broad class of…

In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…

A class of monotone operator equations, which can be decomposed into sum of the gradient of a strongly convex function and a linear and skew-symmetric operator, is considered in this work. Based on discretization of the generalized gradient…

This paper formalizes and analyzes Gaussian smoothing applied to two prominent optimization methods: Stochastic Gradient Descent (GSmoothSGD) and Adam (GSmoothAdam) in deep learning. By attenuating small fluctuations, Gaussian smoothing…

We present novel algorithms for simulation optimization using random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA). These include first-order (gradient) as well as second-order (Newton) schemes. We incorporate both continuous-valued as well as…

Real world datasets often contain noisy labels, and learning from such datasets using standard classification approaches may not produce the desired performance. In this paper, we propose a Gaussian Mixture Discriminant Analysis (GMDA) with…

In this paper we propose a generalization of a class of Gaussian Semiparametric Estimators (GSE) of the fractional differencing parameter for long-range dependent multivariate time series. We generalize a known GSE-type estimator by…

We show that the gradient estimates used in training Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs) with importance-weighted variational inference are susceptible to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) issues. Specifically, we show both theoretically and via an…