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Discretization of continuous-time diffusion processes is a widely recognized method for sampling. However, it seems to be a considerable restriction when the potentials are often required to be smooth (gradient Lipschitz). This paper…
Sampling from constrained statistical distributions is a fundamental task in various fields including Bayesian statistics, computational chemistry, and statistical physics. This article considers the cases where the constrained distribution…
We consider stochastic approximations of sampling algorithms, such as Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) and the Random Batch Method (RBM) for Interacting Particle Dynamcs (IPD). We observe that the noise introduced by the…
Motivated by variational models in continuum mechanics, we introduce a novel algorithm to perform nonsmooth and nonconvex minimizations with linear constraints in Euclidean spaces. We show how this algorithm is actually a natural…
We study the problem of sampling from a distribution $\mu$ with density $\propto e^{-V}$ for some potential function $V:\mathbb R^d\to \mathbb R$ with query access to $V$ and $\nabla V$. We start with the following standard assumptions: (1)…
We analyse a general class of bilevel problems, in which the upper-level problem consists in the minimization of a smooth objective function and the lower-level problem is to find the fixed point of a smooth contraction map. This type of…
We provide a new convergence analysis of stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) for sampling from a class of distributions that can be non-log-concave. At the core of our approach is a novel conductance analysis of SGLD using an…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
In Statistics, log-concave density estimation is a central problem within the field of nonparametric inference under shape constraints. Despite great progress in recent years on the statistical theory of the canonical estimator, namely the…
Sampling from flat modes in discrete spaces is a crucial yet underexplored problem. Flat modes represent robust solutions and have broad applications in combinatorial optimization and discrete generative modeling. However, existing sampling…
We study sampling problems associated with non-convex potentials that meanwhile lack smoothness. In particular, we consider target distributions that satisfy either logarithmic-Sobolev inequality or Poincar\'e inequality. Rather than…
We develop algorithms for the optimization of convex objectives that have H\"older continuous $q$-th derivatives by using a $q$-th order oracle, for any $q \geq 1$. Our algorithms work for general norms under mild conditions, including the…
The problem of finding suitable point embedding or geometric configurations given only Euclidean distance information of point pairs arises both as a core task and as a sub-problem in a variety of machine learning applications. In this…
In this paper we address the convergence of stochastic approximation when the functions to be minimized are not convex and nonsmooth. We show that the "mean-limit" approach to the convergence which leads, for smooth problems, to the ODE…
We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…
This paper develops the proximal method of multipliers for a class of nonsmooth convex optimization. The method generates a sequence of minimization problems (subproblems). We show that the sequence of approximations to the solutions of the…
This work introduces an unconventional inexact augmented Lagrangian method where the augmenting term is a Euclidean norm raised to a power between one and two. The proposed algorithm is applicable to a broad class of constrained nonconvex…
This paper introduces a smoothed proximal Lagrangian method for minimizing a nonconvex smooth function over a convex domain with additional explicit convex nonlinear constraints. Two key features are 1) the proposed method is single-looped,…
We study differentially private (DP) optimization algorithms for stochastic and empirical objectives which are neither smooth nor convex, and propose methods that return a Goldstein-stationary point with sample complexity bounds that…
We consider convex optimization with non-smooth objective function and log-concave sampling with non-smooth potential (negative log density). In particular, we study two specific settings where the convex objective/potential function is…