Related papers: Greedy Stein Variational Gradient Descent: An algo…
Modern supervised learning techniques, particularly those using deep nets, involve fitting high dimensional labelled data sets with functions containing very large numbers of parameters. Much of this work is empirical. Interesting phenomena…
Full waveform inversion is an ill-posed inverse problem whose solution non-uniqueness -- i.e., arising from band-limited, finite-aperture, noisy data -- calls for uncertainty quantification to avoid overconfident geological interpretations.…
In decentralized learning, a network of nodes cooperate to minimize an overall objective function that is usually the finite-sum of their local objectives, and incorporates a non-smooth regularization term for the better generalization…
In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…
Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) update the particles based on the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, the design of…
We consider the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm driven by a general stochastic sequence, including i.i.d noise and random walk on an arbitrary graph, among others; and analyze it in the asymptotic sense. Specifically, we employ…
This work presents a multilevel variant of Stein variational gradient descent to more efficiently sample from target distributions. The key ingredient is a sequence of distributions with growing fidelity and costs that converges to the…
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…
This work analyzes the convergence of a class of smoothing-based gradient descent methods when applied to optimization problems. In particular, Gaussian smoothing is employed to define a nonlocal gradient that reduces high-frequency noise,…
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…
Understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants is essential for machine learning. However, most of the preceding analyses are conducted under amenable conditions such as unbiased gradient estimator and bounded objective…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
In this paper, we aim at providing an introduction to the gradient descent based optimization algorithms for learning deep neural network models. Deep learning models involving multiple nonlinear projection layers are very challenging to…
Policy gradient methods have been successfully applied to many complex reinforcement learning problems. However, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance, slow convergence, and inefficient exploration. In this work, we introduce a…
In this paper, we propose projected gradient descent (PGD) algorithms for signal estimation from noisy nonlinear measurements. We assume that the unknown $p$-dimensional signal lies near the range of an $L$-Lipschitz continuous generative…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
We consider the setting where a master wants to run a distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm on $n$ workers, each having a subset of the data. Distributed SGD may suffer from the effect of stragglers, i.e., slow or…
Compressed Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms have been recently proposed to address the communication bottleneck in distributed and decentralized optimization problems, such as those that arise in federated machine learning.…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the main algorithm behind a large body of work in machine learning. In many cases, constraints are enforced via projections, leading to projected stochastic gradient algorithms. In recent years, a large…
Variational empirical Bayes (VEB) methods provide a practically attractive approach to fitting large, sparse, multiple regression models. These methods usually use coordinate ascent to optimize the variational objective function, an…