Related papers: No Free Lunch for Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dyn…

Training neural networks requires optimizing a loss function that may be highly irregular, and in particular neither convex nor smooth. Popular training algorithms are based on stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM), for which…

We propose quantum algorithms that provide provable speedups for Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods commonly used for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi \propto e^{-f}$, where $f$ is a potential function. Our…

Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a powerful algorithm for optimizing a non-convex objective, where a controlled and properly scaled Gaussian noise is added to the stochastic gradients to steer the iterates towards a global…

Sampling from a log-concave distribution function is one core problem that has wide applications in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. While most gradient free methods have slow convergence rate, the Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) that…

We study a variation of vanilla stochastic gradient descent where the optimizer only has access to a Markovian sampling scheme. These schemes encompass applications that range from decentralized optimization with a random walker (token…

Recent studies on diffusion-based sampling methods have shown that Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithms can be beneficial for non-convex optimization, and rigorous theoretical guarantees have been proven for both asymptotic and finite-time…

The sampling of probability distributions specified up to a normalization constant is an important problem in both machine learning and statistical mechanics. While classical stochastic sampling methods such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo…

We extend the Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm to compactly supported measures via a projection step, akin to projected Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). We show that (projected) LMC allows to sample in polynomial time from a…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for minimizing objective functions that arise in machine learning. For constant step-sized SGD, the iterates form a Markov chain on a general state space. Focusing on a class of…

Monte Carlo maximum likelihood (MCML) provides an elegant approach to find maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) for latent variable models. However, MCML algorithms are computationally expensive when the latent variables are…

Decentralized stochastic gradient method emerges as a promising solution for solving large-scale machine learning problems. This paper studies the decentralized Markov chain gradient descent (DMGD) algorithm - a variant of the decentralized…

Replica exchange stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (reSGLD) has shown promise in accelerating the convergence in non-convex learning; however, an excessively large correction for avoiding biases from noisy energy estimators has limited…

Stochastic approximation methods play a central role in maximum likelihood estimation problems involving intractable likelihood functions, such as marginal likelihoods arising in problems with missing or incomplete data, and in parametric…

There has been considerable interest in designing Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms by exploiting numerical methods for Langevin dynamics, which includes Hamiltonian dynamics as a deterministic case. A prominent approach is Hamiltonian…

We introduce a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that is designed to sample from target distributions with irregular geometry using an adaptive scheme. In cases where targets exhibit non-Gaussian behaviour, we propose that adaption…

This paper studies the fundamental problem of learning deep generative models that consist of multiple layers of latent variables organized in top-down architectures. Such models have high expressivity and allow for learning hierarchical…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), such as Langevin dynamics, is valid for approximating intractable distributions. However, its usage is limited in the context of deep latent variable models owing to costly datapoint-wise sampling iterations…

We present a unified framework to analyze the global convergence of Langevin dynamics based algorithms for nonconvex finite-sum optimization with $n$ component functions. At the core of our analysis is a direct analysis of the ergodicity of…

One way to avoid overfitting in machine learning is to use model parameters distributed according to a Bayesian posterior given the data, rather than the maximum likelihood estimator. Stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) is one…

We propose a sequential Markov chain Monte Carlo (SMCMC) algorithm to sample from a sequence of probability distributions, corresponding to posterior distributions at different times in on-line applications. SMCMC proceeds as in usual MCMC…