Related papers: Branching Stein Variational Gradient Descent for s…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been increasingly popular in Bayesian learning due to its ability to deal with large data. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples from a discretized-time Markov chain 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…
We address the optimization problem of simultaneously minimizing multiple objective functionals over a family of probability distributions. This type of Multi-Objective Distributional Optimization commonly arises in machine learning and…
We propose an adaptively weighted stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics algorithm (SGLD), so-called contour stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (CSGLD), for Bayesian learning in big data statistics. The proposed algorithm is essentially a…
The presence of uncertainty in material properties and geometry of a structure is ubiquitous. The design of robust engineering structures, therefore, needs to incorporate uncertainty in the optimization process. Stochastic gradient descent…
We consider stochastic optimization under distributional uncertainty, where the unknown distributional parameter is estimated from streaming data that arrive sequentially over time. Moreover, data may depend on the decision of the time when…
In this paper we introduce a unified analysis of a large family of variants of proximal stochastic gradient descent ({\tt SGD}) which so far have required different intuitions, convergence analyses, have different applications, and which…
We consider a variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a random learning rate and reveal its convergence properties. SGD is a widely used stochastic optimization algorithm in machine learning, especially deep learning. Numerous…
We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of \emph{heterogeneous} functions distributed across several machines with a focus on communication efficiency. In such settings, naively using the classical stochastic…
We present a filtering framework for online joint state estimation and parameter identification in nonlinear, time-varying systems. The algorithm uses Rao-Blackwellization technique to infer joint state-parameter posteriors efficiently. In…
Distributed inference/estimation in Bayesian framework in the context of sensor networks has recently received much attention due to its broad applicability. The variational Bayesian (VB) algorithm is a technique for approximating…
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…
Stochastic particle-optimization sampling (SPOS) is a recently-developed scalable Bayesian sampling framework that unifies stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) algorithms based on Wasserstein…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most important single algorithm in modern machine learning. Although SGD with unbiased gradient estimators has been studied extensively over at least half a century, SGD variants relying on…
In many applications involving large dataset or online updating, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a scalable way to compute parameter estimates and has gained increasing popularity due to its numerical convenience and memory…
We propose a new Stein self-repulsive dynamics for obtaining diversified samples from intractable un-normalized distributions. Our idea is to introduce Stein variational gradient as a repulsive force to push the samples of Langevin dynamics…
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…
Decentralized coordination for multi-robot systems involves planning in challenging, high-dimensional spaces. The planning problem is particularly challenging in the presence of obstacles and different sources of uncertainty such as…
In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…
Learning probability distributions on the weights of neural networks (NNs) has recently proven beneficial in many applications. Bayesian methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), offer an elegant framework to reason about…