Related papers: Optimising two-block averaging kernels to speed up…

Let \phi(G) be the minimum conductance of an undirected graph G, and let 0=\lambda_1 <= \lambda_2 <=... <= \lambda_n <= 2 be the eigenvalues of the normalized Laplacian matrix of G. We prove that for any graph G and any k >= 2, \phi(G) =…

A spectral mixture (SM) kernel is a flexible kernel used to model any stationary covariance function. Although it is useful in modeling data, the learning of the SM kernel is generally difficult because optimizing a large number of…

We consider the problem of controlling a Markov decision process (MDP) with a large state space, so as to minimize average cost. Since it is intractable to compete with the optimal policy for large scale problems, we pursue the more modest…

We address the problem of finding the nearest graph Laplacian to a given matrix, with the distance measured using the Frobenius norm. Specifically, for the directed graph Laplacian, we propose two novel algorithms by reformulating the…

We introduce a mini-batch stochastic variance-reduced algorithm to solve finite-sum scale invariant problems which cover several examples in machine learning and statistics such as principal component analysis (PCA) and estimation of…

For a given Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm we introduce a distance between two configurations that quantifies the difficulty of transition from one configuration to the other configuration. We argue that the distance takes a universal…

Recently, a method called the Mutual Information Neural Estimator (MINE) that uses neural networks has been proposed to estimate mutual information and more generally the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between two distributions. The…

The contributions of the paper span theoretical and implementational results. First, we prove that Kd-trees can be extended to spaces in which the distance is measured with an arbitrary Bregman divergence. Perhaps surprisingly, this shows…

We theoretically investigate the convergence rate and support consistency (i.e., correctly identifying the subset of non-zero coefficients in the large sample limit) of multiple kernel learning (MKL). We focus on MKL with block-l1…

We introduce a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that is designed to sample from target distributions with irregular geometry using an adaptive scheme. In cases where targets exhibit non-Gaussian behaviour, we propose that adaption…

Covariance matrix plays a central role in multivariate statistical analysis. Significant advances have been made recently on developing both theory and methodology for estimating large covariance matrices. However, a minimax theory has yet…

We investigate whether shallow quantum circuits can accurately reproduce the short-horizon dynamics of discrete-time Markov chains derived from fashion electronic-commerce recommendation links. Transition operators are compiled into…

This paper proposes two linear projection methods for supervised dimension reduction using only the first and second-order statistics. The methods, each catering to a different parameter regime, are derived under the general Gaussian model…

We investigate the problem of best-policy identification in discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the learner has access to a generative model. The objective is to devise a learning algorithm returning the best policy as early as…

Estimating the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between random variables is a fundamental problem in statistical analysis. For continuous random variables, traditional information-theoretic estimators scale poorly with dimension and/or…

In this paper, we consider a class of nonsmooth sum-of-ratios fractional optimization problems with block structure. This model class is ubiquitous and encompasses several important nonsmooth optimization problems in the literature. We…

We study the problem of spectrum estimation from transmission data of a known phantom. The goal is to reconstruct an x-ray spectrum that can accurately model the x-ray transmission curves and reflects a realistic shape of the typical energy…

We study the convergence properties of a general inertial first-order proximal splitting algorithm for solving nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems. Using the Kurdyka--\L ojaziewicz (KL) inequality we establish new convergence rates…

Bayesian optimization is a popular method for optimizing expensive black-box functions. Yet it oftentimes struggles in high dimensions where the computation could be prohibitively heavy. To alleviate this problem, we introduce Coordinate…

As machine learning (ML) applications grow increasingly complex in recent years, modern ML frameworks often need to address multiple potentially conflicting objectives with coupled decision variables across different layers. This creates a…