Related papers: From Global to Local: A Scalable Benchmark for Loc…

In this paper, our goal is to design a simple learning paradigm for long-tail visual recognition, which not only improves the robustness of the feature extractor but also alleviates the bias of the classifier towards head classes while…

Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) has emerged as a key MCMC algorithm for Bayesian learning from large scale datasets. While SGLD with decreasing step sizes converges weakly to the posterior distribution, the algorithm is often…

We consider solving a convex, possibly stochastic optimization problem over a randomly time-varying multi-agent network. Each agent has access to some local objective function, and it only has unbiased estimates of the gradients of the…

In federated distributed learning, the goal is to optimize a global training objective defined over distributed devices, where the data shard at each device is sampled from a possibly different distribution (a.k.a., heterogeneous or non…

Stochastic-gradient MCMC methods enable scalable Bayesian posterior sampling but often suffer from sensitivity to minibatch size and gradient noise. To address this, we propose Stochastic Gradient Lattice Random Walk (SGLRW), an extension…

Due to the highly non-convex nature of large-scale robust parameter estimation, avoiding poor local minima is challenging in real-world applications where input data is contaminated by a large or unknown fraction of outliers. In this paper,…

Minimum sum-of-squares clustering (MSSC) is a widely used clustering model, of which the popular K-means algorithm constitutes a local minimizer. It is well known that the solutions of K-means can be arbitrarily distant from the true MSSC…

Gaussian processes (GPs) are commonly used for prediction and inference for spatial data analyses. However, since estimation and prediction tasks have cubic time and quadratic memory complexity in number of locations, GPs are difficult to…

Training deep neural networks with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) can often achieve zero training loss on real-world tasks although the optimization landscape is known to be highly non-convex. To understand the success of SGD for…

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…

Previous works on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) often focus on its success. In this work, we construct worst-case optimization problems illustrating that, when not in the regimes that the previous works often assume, SGD can exhibit…

Multiple sampling-based methods have been developed for approximating and accelerating node embedding aggregation in graph convolutional networks (GCNs) training. Among them, a layer-wise approach recursively performs importance sampling to…

The paper considers the problem of network-based computation of global minima in smooth nonconvex optimization problems. It is known that distributed gradient-descent-type algorithms can achieve convergence to the set of global minima by…

Neighborhood sampling is an important ingredient in the training of large-scale graph neural networks. It suppresses the exponential growth of the neighborhood size across network layers and maintains feasible memory consumption and time…

Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…

Multi-layer neural networks are among the most powerful models in machine learning, yet the fundamental reasons for this success defy mathematical understanding. Learning a neural network requires to optimize a non-convex high-dimensional…

A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) aim to generate realistic data from some prior distribution (e.g., Gaussian noises). However, such prior distribution is often independent of real data and thus may lose semantic information (e.g.,…

Achieving robust uncertainty quantification for deep neural networks represents an important requirement in many real-world applications of deep learning such as medical imaging where it is necessary to assess the reliability of a neural…

The posteriors over neural network weights are high dimensional and multimodal. Each mode typically characterizes a meaningfully different representation of the data. We develop Cyclical Stochastic Gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) to automatically…