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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
We consider the stochastic approximation problem where a convex function has to be minimized, given only the knowledge of unbiased estimates of its gradients at certain points, a framework which includes machine learning methods based on…
We consider problems of minimizing functionals $\mathcal{F}$ of probability measures on the Euclidean space. To propose an accelerated gradient descent algorithm for such problems, we consider gradient flow of transport maps that give…
Particle-based variational inference offers a flexible way of approximating complex posterior distributions with a set of particles. In this paper we introduce a new particle-based variational inference method based on the theory of…
We consider the problem of minimizing a strongly convex function that depends on an uncertain parameter $\theta$. The uncertainty in the objective function means that the optimum, $x^*(\theta)$, is also a function of $\theta$. We propose an…
This paper revisits the Polyak step size schedule for convex optimization problems, proving that a simple variant of it simultaneously attains near optimal convergence rates for the gradient descent algorithm, for all ranges of strong…
In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing continuous submodular functions that naturally arise in many learning applications such as those involving utility functions in active learning and sensing, matrix approximations and network…
This paper considers non-smooth optimization problems where we seek to minimize the pointwise maximum of a continuously parameterized family of functions. Since the objective function is given as the solution to a maximization problem,…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex objective which is the sum of a smooth part, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a nonsmooth part. Inspired by various applications, we focus on the case when the nonsmooth part is a…
We consider the task of decentralized minimization of the sum of smooth strongly convex functions stored across the nodes of a network. For this problem, lower bounds on the number of gradient computations and the number of communication…
Poisson likelihood models have been prevalently used in imaging, social networks, and time series analysis. We propose fast, simple, theoretically-grounded, and versatile, optimization algorithms for Poisson likelihood modeling. The Poisson…
We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular,…
We develop a new proximal-gradient method for minimizing the sum of a differentiable, possibly nonconvex, function plus a convex, possibly non differentiable, function. The key features of the proposed method are the definition of a…
We examine the infinite-dimensional optimization problem of finding a decomposition of a probability measure into K probability sub-measures to minimize specific loss functions inspired by applications in clustering and user grouping. We…
In many problems in machine learning and operations research, we need to optimize a function whose input is a random variable or a probability density function, i.e. to solve optimization problems in an infinite dimensional space. On the…
In this work, we describe a generic approach to show convergence with high probability for stochastic convex optimization. In previous works, either the convergence is only in expectation or the bound depends on the diameter of the domain.…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…
Optimal transport (OT) provides powerful tools for comparing probability measures in various types. The Wasserstein distance which arises naturally from the idea of OT is widely used in many machine learning applications. Unfortunately,…
Bilevel optimization has been developed for many machine learning tasks with large-scale and high-dimensional data. This paper considers a constrained bilevel optimization problem, where the lower-level optimization problem is convex with…