Related papers: Probabilistic Gaussian Homotopy: A Probability-Spa…
Task learning in neural networks typically requires finding a globally optimal minimizer to a loss function objective. Conventional designs of swarm based optimization methods apply a fixed update rule, with possibly an adaptive step-size…
Sparse high dimensional graphical model selection is a topic of much interest in modern day statistics. A popular approach is to apply l1-penalties to either (1) parametric likelihoods, or, (2) regularized regression/pseudo-likelihoods,…
Modeling spatial processes that exhibit both smooth and rough features poses a significant challenge. This is especially true in fields where complex physical variables are observed across spatial domains. Traditional spatial techniques,…
In this paper, we propose a probabilistic optimization method, named probabilistic incremental proximal gradient (PIPG) method, by developing a probabilistic interpretation of the incremental proximal gradient algorithm. We explicitly model…
The paper proposes and justifies a new algorithm of the proximal Newton type to solve a broad class of nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems without strong convexity assumptions. Based on advanced notions and techniques of…
Persistence-based topological optimization deforms a point cloud $X \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ by minimizing objectives of the form $L(X) = \ell(\mathrm{Dgm}(X))$, where $\mathrm{Dgm}(X)$ is a persistence diagram. In practice, optimization is…
We present a uniform analysis of biased stochastic gradient methods for minimizing convex, strongly convex, and non-convex composite objectives, and identify settings where bias is useful in stochastic gradient estimation. The framework we…
We present a novel class of projected gradient (PG) methods for minimizing a smooth but not necessarily convex function over a convex compact set. We first provide a novel analysis of the constant-stepsize PG method, achieving the…
Various optimal gradient-based algorithms have been developed for smooth nonconvex optimization. However, many nonconvex machine learning problems do not belong to the class of smooth functions and therefore the existing algorithms are…
We introduce a new approach to develop stochastic optimization algorithms for a class of stochastic composite and possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The main idea is to combine two stochastic estimators to create a new hybrid one. We…
We introduce GS-PowerHP, a novel zeroth-order method for non-convex optimization problems of the form $\max_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x)$. Our approach leverages two key components: a power-transformed Gaussian-smoothed surrogate…
We propose a general random subspace framework for unconstrained nonconvex optimization problems that requires a weak probabilistic assumption on the subspace gradient, which we show to be satisfied by various random matrix ensembles, such…
We propose a principled algorithm for robust Bayesian filtering and smoothing in nonlinear stochastic dynamic systems when both the transition function and the measurement function are described by non-parametric Gaussian process (GP)…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
We introduce a new framework for the convergence analysis of a class of distributed constrained non-convex optimization algorithms in multi-agent systems. The aim is to search for local minimizers of a non-convex objective function which is…
This paper proposes a fast decentralized algorithm for solving a consensus optimization problem defined in a directed networked multi-agent system, where the local objective functions have the smooth+nonsmooth composite form, and are…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful framework for optimizing expensive black-box objectives, yet extending it to graph-structured domains remains challenging due to the discrete and combinatorial nature of graphs. Existing approaches…
This article introduces a novel family of optimization algorithms - Anisotropic Gaussian Smoothing Gradient Descent (AGS-GD), AGS-Stochastic Gradient Descent (AGS-SGD), and AGS-Adam - that employ anisotropic Gaussian smoothing to enhance…
Thompson sampling (TS) is a simple, effective stochastic policy in Bayesian decision making. It samples the posterior belief about the reward profile and optimizes the sample to obtain a candidate decision. In continuous optimization, the…