Related papers: Beyond Smoothness and Convexity: Optimization via …
Underdamped Langevin Monte Carlo (ULMC) is an algorithm used to sample from unnormalized densities by leveraging the momentum of a particle moving in a potential well. We provide a novel analysis of ULMC, motivated by two central questions:…
Priors with non-smooth log-densities, such as the l1-prior, are widely used in Bayesian inverse problems for their sparsity-inducing properties. Existing Langevin-based sampling methods typically rely on proximal mappings or smooth…
In this paper, we consider nonconvex optimization problems with nonsmooth nonconvex objective function and nonlinear equality constraints. We assume that both the objective function and the functional constraints can be separated into 2…
We propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm based on third-order Langevin dynamics for sampling from distributions with log-concave and smooth densities. The higher-order dynamics allow for more flexible discretization schemes,…
Solving statistical learning problems often involves nonconvex optimization. Despite the empirical success of nonconvex statistical optimization methods, their global dynamics, especially convergence to the desirable local minima, remain…
Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) and its stochastic gradient versions are powerful algorithms for sampling from complex high-dimensional distributions. To sample from a distribution with density $\pi(\theta)\propto \exp(-U(\theta)) $, LMC…
We develop a novel procedure for estimating the optimizer of general convex stochastic optimization problems of the form $\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}} \mathbb{E}[F(x,\xi)]$, when the given data is a finite independent sample selected according to…
This technical note considers a distributed convex optimization problem with nonsmooth cost functions and coupled nonlinear inequality constraints. To solve the problem, we first propose a modified Lagrangian function containing local…
Despite recent advances, sampling-based inference for Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) remains a significant challenge in probabilistic deep learning. While sampling-based approaches do not require a variational distribution assumption,…
We consider nonconvex optimization problem over simplex, and more generally, a product of simplices. We provide an algorithm, Langevin Multiplicative Weights Update (LMWU) for solving global optimization problems by adding a noise scaling…
We formulate gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as optimization on the space of probability measures, with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the objective functional. We show that an underdamped form of the Langevin…
We introduce a clipping strategy for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) which uses quantiles of the gradient norm as clipping thresholds. We prove that this new strategy provides a robust and efficient optimization algorithm for smooth…
When the nonconvex problem is complicated by stochasticity, the sample complexity of stochastic first-order methods may depend linearly on the problem dimension, which is undesirable for large-scale problems. To alleviate this linear…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of successively minimizing a sequence of upper bounds of the objective function so that along the iterations the objective function decreases. Such a simple principle allows to solve a large…
In this paper, a modification to the Gradient Sampling (GS) method for minimizing nonsmooth nonconvex functions is presented. One drawback in GS method is the need of solving a Quadratic optimization Problem (QP) at each iteration, which is…
Decentralized optimization for non-convex problems are now demanding by many emerging applications (e.g., smart grids, smart building, etc.). Though dramatic progress has been achieved in convex problems, the results for non-convex cases,…
Sampling from various kinds of distributions is an issue of paramount importance in statistics since it is often the key ingredient for constructing estimators, test procedures or confidence intervals. In many situations, the exact sampling…
While many distributed optimization algorithms have been proposed for solving smooth or convex problems over the networks, few of them can handle non-convex and non-smooth problems. Based on a proximal primal-dual approach, this paper…
Explicit, momentum-based dynamics for optimizing functions defined on Lie groups was recently constructed, based on techniques such as variational optimization and left trivialization. We appropriately add tractable noise to the…
In this paper, we consider a finite-dimensional optimization problem minimizing a continuous objective on a compact domain subject to a multi-dimensional constraint function. For the latter, we assume the availability of a global Lipschitz…