Related papers: A clustering heuristic to improve a derivative-fre…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
Classifier-free Guidance (CFG) is a widely used technique in modern diffusion models for enhancing sample quality and prompt adherence. However, through an empirical analysis on Gaussian mixture modeling with a closed-form solution, we…
This paper proposes a nonmonotone proximal quasi-Newton algorithm for unconstrained convex multiobjective composite optimization problems. To design the search direction, we minimize the max-scalarization of the variations of the Hessian…
Consensus based optimization is a derivative-free particles-based method for the solution of global optimization problems. Several versions of the method have been proposed in the literature, and different convergence results have been…
Log-density gradient estimation is a fundamental statistical problem and possesses various practical applications such as clustering and measuring non-Gaussianity. A naive two-step approach of first estimating the density and then taking…
Structured optimization problems are ubiquitous in fields like data science and engineering. The goal in structured optimization is using a prescribed set of points, called atoms, to build up a solution that minimizes or maximizes a given…
We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained…
We propose a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method that can incorporate adaptive sampling for stochastic nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems with upper-C^2 objectives. Upper-$\Ctwo$ functions can be viewed as…
In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…
Hessian-free (HF) optimization has been shown to effectively train deep autoencoders (Martens, 2010). In this paper, we aim to accelerate HF training of autoencoders by reducing the amount of data used in training. HF utilizes the conjugate…
We propose a new class of rigorous methods for derivative-free optimization with the aim of delivering efficient and robust numerical performance for functions of all types, from smooth to non-smooth, and under different noise regimes. To…
In this paper, we deal with the problem of curves clustering. We propose a nonparametric method which partitions the curves into clusters and discretizes the dimensions of the curve points into intervals. The cross-product of these…
We consider distributed optimization over networks where each agent is associated with a smooth and strongly convex local objective function. We assume that the agents only have access to unbiased estimators of the gradient of their…
This paper proposes a stochastic variant of a classic algorithm---the cubic-regularized Newton method [Nesterov and Polyak 2006]. The proposed algorithm efficiently escapes saddle points and finds approximate local minima for general…
Solving statistical learning problems often involves nonconvex optimization. Despite the empirical success of nonconvex statistical optimization methods, their global dynamics, especially convergence to the desirable local minima, remain…
Second-order methods are provably faster than first-order methods, and their efficient implementations for large-scale optimization problems have attracted significant attention. Yet, optimization problems in ML often have nonsmooth…
We propose a Fourier-based approach for optimization of several clustering algorithms. Mathematically, clusters data can be described by a density function represented by the Dirac mixture distribution. The density function can be smoothed…
Continual learning (CL) presents a fundamental challenge in training neural networks on sequential tasks without experiencing catastrophic forgetting. Traditionally, the dominant approach in CL has been gradient-based optimization, where…
In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…
This paper presents a novel natural gradient and Hessian-free (NGHF) optimisation framework for neural network training that can operate efficiently in a distributed manner. It relies on the linear conjugate gradient (CG) algorithm to…