Related papers: Stationary MMD Points
We consider the problem of sampling from a target distribution, which is \emph {not necessarily logconcave}, in the context of empirical risk minimization and stochastic optimization as presented in Raginsky et al. (2017). Non-asymptotic…
We address the estimation problem for general finite mixture models, with a particular focus on the elliptical mixture models (EMMs). Compared to the widely adopted Kullback-Leibler divergence, we show that the Wasserstein distance provides…
This work focuses on per-video unsupervised action segmentation, which is of interest to applications where storing large datasets is either not possible, or nor permitted. We propose to segment videos by learning in deep kernel space, to…
We analyse the performance of several iterative algorithms for the quantisation of a probability measure $\mu$, based on the minimisation of a Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD). Our analysis includes kernel herding, greedy MMD minimisation and…
In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing continuous submodular functions that naturally arise in many learning applications such as those involving utility functions in active learning and sensing, matrix approximations and network…
We develop a geometric convergence theory for neural-network optimization within the minimizing movement scheme (MMS) framework. Reformulating each neural MMS step as a minimization over the set of increments in a Hilbert space, we show…
Stochastic mirror descent (SMD) is a fairly new family of algorithms that has recently found a wide range of applications in optimization, machine learning, and control. It can be considered a generalization of the classical stochastic…
The Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) has found numerous applications in statistics and machine learning, most recently as a penalty in the Wasserstein Auto-Encoder (WAE). In this paper we compute closed-form expressions for estimating the…
This paper considers non-smooth optimization problems where we seek to minimize the pointwise maximum of a continuously parameterized family of functions. Since the objective function is given as the solution to a maximization problem,…
For finite-dimensional problems, stochastic approximation methods have long been used to solve stochastic optimization problems. Their application to infinite-dimensional problems is less understood, particularly for nonconvex objectives.…
Recently, Deng et al. (2026) proposed Generative Modeling via Drifting (GMD), a novel framework for generative tasks. This note presents an analysis of GMD through the lens of Wasserstein Gradient Flows (WGF), i.e., the path of steepest…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
We give a comprehensive description of Wasserstein gradient flows of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) functionals $\mathcal F_\nu := \text{MMD}_K^2(\cdot, \nu)$ towards given target measures $\nu$ on the real line, where we focus on the…
We consider centralized and distributed mirror descent algorithms over a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, and prove that the problem variables converge to an optimizer of a possibly nonsmooth function when the step sizes are square…
We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…
Metric data plays an important role in various settings such as metric-based indexing, clustering, classification, and approximation algorithms in general. Due to measurement error, noise, or an inability to completely gather all the data,…
We study the problem of minimizing a $m$-weakly convex and possibly nonsmooth function. Weak convexity provides a broad framework that subsumes convex, smooth, and many composite nonconvex functions. In this work, we propose a…
Minimum flow decomposition (MFD) is the NP-hard problem of finding a smallest decomposition of a network flow/circulation $X$ on a directed graph $G$ into weighted source-to-sink paths whose superposition equals $X$. We show that, for…
This paper considers constrained stochastic nonsmooth minimax optimization problem of the form…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…