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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,…
Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…
Recent years have seen a flurry of activities in designing provably efficient nonconvex procedures for solving statistical estimation problems. Due to the highly nonconvex nature of the empirical loss, state-of-the-art procedures often…
We consider solving a convex, possibly stochastic optimization problem over a randomly time-varying multi-agent network. Each agent has access to some local objective function, and it only has unbiased estimates of the gradients of the…
Adaptive gradient methods such as AdaGrad and its variants update the stepsize in stochastic gradient descent on the fly according to the gradients received along the way; such methods have gained widespread use in large-scale optimization…
Gradient estimation -- approximating the gradient of an expectation with respect to the parameters of a distribution -- is central to the solution of many machine learning problems. However, when the distribution is discrete, most common…
Many statistical $M$-estimators are based on convex optimization problems formed by the combination of a data-dependent loss function with a norm-based regularizer. We analyze the convergence rates of projected gradient and composite…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) or stochastic approximation has been widely used in model training and stochastic optimization. While there is a huge literature on analyzing its convergence, inference on the obtained solutions from SGD…
We prove local convergence of several notable gradient descent algorithms used in machine learning, for which standard stochastic gradient descent theory does not apply directly. This includes, first, online algorithms for recurrent models…
Many machine learning applications and tasks rely on the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variants. Effective step length selection is crucial for the success of these algorithms, which has motivated the development of…
Computing the gradient of a function provides fundamental information about its behavior. This information is essential for several applications and algorithms across various fields. One common application that require gradients are…
Stochastic gradient methods are central to large-scale learning, but they treat mini-batch gradients as unbiased estimators, which classical decision theory shows are inadmissible in high dimensions. We formulate gradient computation as a…
We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of…
A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…
Adaptive optimization methods, which perform local optimization with a metric constructed from the history of iterates, are becoming increasingly popular for training deep neural networks. Examples include AdaGrad, RMSProp, and Adam. We…
A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The…
Fine-tuning pretrained models has become a standard approach to adapting pretrained knowledge to improve the accuracy on new sparse, imbalance datasets. However, issues arise when optimization falls into a collapsed state, where the model…
Modeling and simulation approaches that express crowd movement with mathematical models are widely and actively studied to understand crowd movement and resolve crowd accidents. Existing literature on crowd modeling focuses on only the…
This paper studies a class of adaptive gradient based momentum algorithms that update the search directions and learning rates simultaneously using past gradients. This class, which we refer to as the "Adam-type", includes the popular…
Differential equations in general and neural ODEs in particular are an essential technique in continuous-time system identification. While many deterministic learning algorithms have been designed based on numerical integration via the…