Related papers: On the mean-field limit for Stein variational grad…

In this note, we establish a descent lemma for the population limit Mirrored Stein Variational Gradient Method~(MSVGD). This descent lemma does not rely on the path information of MSVGD but rather on a simple assumption for the mirrored…

Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large-scale machine learning problems, by virtue of its light complexity per iteration. However, it lags behind its non-stochastic counterparts with respect to the convergence rate,…

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…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

A new method for learning variational autoencoders (VAEs) is developed, based on Stein variational gradient descent. A key advantage of this approach is that one need not make parametric assumptions about the form of the encoder…

Maximum marginal likelihood estimation (MMLE) can be formulated as the optimization of a free energy functional. From this viewpoint, the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm admits a natural interpretation as a coordinate descent method…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a low-rank factorization is commonly employed to speed up matrix problems including matrix completion, subspace tracking, and SDP relaxation. In this paper, we exhibit a step size scheme for SGD on a…

In this work, we propose Natural Hypergradient Descent (NHGD), a new method for solving bilevel optimization problems. To address the computational bottleneck in hypergradient estimation--namely, the need to compute or approximate Hessian…

We introduce a doubly stochastic proximal gradient algorithm for optimizing a finite average of smooth convex functions, whose gradients depend on numerically expensive expectations. Our main motivation is the acceleration of the…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

We formalize an equivalence between two popular methods for Bayesian inference: Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and black-box variational inference (BBVI). In particular, we show that BBVI corresponds precisely to SVGD when the…

This paper studies the optimization of the KL functional on the Wasserstein space of probability measures, and develops a sampling framework based on Wasserstein gradient descent (WGD). We identify two important subclasses of the…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…

The presence of uncertainty in material properties and geometry of a structure is ubiquitous. The design of robust engineering structures, therefore, needs to incorporate uncertainty in the optimization process. Stochastic gradient descent…

The Stein Variational Gradient Descent method is a variational inference method in statistics that has recently received a lot of attention. The method provides a deterministic approximation of the target distribution, by introducing a…

Due to the massive size of the neural network models and training datasets used in machine learning today, it is imperative to distribute stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by splitting up tasks such as gradient evaluation across multiple…

A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…

This paper proposes a thorough theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with non-increasing step sizes. First, we show that the recursion defining SGD can be provably approximated by solutions of a time inhomogeneous…

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

Variance reduced stochastic gradient (SGD) methods converge significantly faster than the vanilla SGD counterpart. However, these methods are not very practical on large scale problems, as they either i) require frequent passes over the…