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Low-rank adapters (LoRAs) are a parameter-efficient finetuning technique that injects trainable low-rank matrices into pretrained models to adapt them to new tasks. Mixture-of-LoRAs models expand neural networks efficiently by routing each…

Variational regularization techniques are dominant in the field of mathematical imaging. A drawback of these techniques is that they are dependent on a number of parameters which have to be set by the user. A by now common strategy to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-10 Matthias J. Ehrhardt , Lindon Roberts

Training of discrete latent variable models remains challenging because passing gradient information through discrete units is difficult. We propose a new class of smoothing transformations based on a mixture of two overlapping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-29 Arash Vahdat , William G. Macready , Zhengbing Bian , Amir Khoshaman , Evgeny Andriyash

Discrete variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are able to represent semantic latent spaces in generative learning. In many real-life settings, the discrete latent space consists of high-dimensional structures, and propagating gradients through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Alon Berliner , Guy Rotman , Yossi Adi , Roi Reichart , Tamir Hazan

Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-02 Andriy Mnih , Danilo J. Rezende

Low-variance gradient estimation is crucial for learning directed graphical models parameterized by neural networks, where the reparameterization trick is widely used for those with continuous variables. While this technique gives…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-07 Seiya Tokui , Issei sato

The state-of-the-art methods for estimating high-dimensional covariance matrices all shrink the eigenvalues of the sample covariance matrix towards a data-insensitive shrinkage target. The underlying shrinkage transformation is either…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-25 Man-Chung Yue , Yves Rychener , Daniel Kuhn , Viet Anh Nguyen

Deterministic Rank Reduction Autoencoders (RRAEs) enforce by construction a regularization on the latent space by applying a truncated SVD. While this regularization makes Autoencoders more powerful, using them for generative purposes is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Jad Mounayer , Alicia Tierz , Jerome Tomezyk , Chady Ghnatios , Francisco Chinesta

We propose a nonconvex estimator for joint multivariate regression and precision matrix estimation in the high dimensional regime, under sparsity constraints. A gradient descent algorithm with hard thresholding is developed to solve the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-03 Jinghui Chen , Quanquan Gu

The radiative transfer equation models various physical processes ranging from plasma simulations to radiation therapy. In practice, these phenomena are often subject to uncertainties. Modeling and propagating these uncertainties requires…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-06-02 Chinmay Patwardhan , Pia Stammer , Emil Løvbak , Jonas Kusch , Sebastian Krumscheid

We study online inference and asymptotic covariance estimation for the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. While classical methods (such as plug-in and batch-means estimators) are available, they either require inaccessible…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-24 Ziyang Wei , Wanrong Zhu , Jingyang Lyu , Wei Biao Wu

Traditional portfolio management methods can incorporate specific investor preferences but rely on accurate forecasts of asset returns and covariances. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods do not rely on these explicit forecasts and are…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2022-03-23 Ruan Pretorius , Terence van Zyl

The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the…

Computation · Statistics 2019-06-18 Alexander Immer , Guillaume P. Dehaene

The representation of the approximate posterior is a critical aspect of effective variational autoencoders (VAEs). Poor choices for the approximate posterior have a detrimental impact on the generative performance of VAEs due to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-09 Arash Vahdat , Evgeny Andriyash , William G. Macready

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are well-established as a principled approach to probabilistic unsupervised learning with neural networks. Typically, an encoder network defines the parameters of a Gaussian distributed latent space from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Alan Jeffares , Liyuan Liu

While deep generative models have succeeded in image processing, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, training that involves discrete random variables remains challenging due to the high variance of its gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Ting-Han Fan , Ta-Chung Chi , Alexander I. Rudnicky , Peter J. Ramadge

This paper proposes a deep recurrent Rotation Averaging Graph Optimizer (RAGO) for Multiple Rotation Averaging (MRA). Conventional optimization-based methods usually fail to produce accurate results due to corrupted and noisy relative…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Heng Li , Zhaopeng Cui , Shuaicheng Liu , Ping Tan

Black-box variational inference (BBVI) now sees widespread use in machine learning and statistics as a fast yet flexible alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, stochastic optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-22 Manushi Welandawe , Michael Riis Andersen , Aki Vehtari , Jonathan H. Huggins

This paper studies the fundamental problem of learning deep generative models that consist of multiple layers of latent variables organized in top-down architectures. Such models have high expressivity and allow for learning hierarchical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-21 Erik Nijkamp , Bo Pang , Tian Han , Linqi Zhou , Song-Chun Zhu , Ying Nian Wu

Estimating the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence between language models has many applications, e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), interpretability, and knowledge distillation. However, computing the exact KL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Ryan Cotterell