Related papers: SGD for Variational Inference: Tackling Unbounded …
This paper is concerned with the approximation of probability distributions known up to normalization constants, with a focus on Bayesian inference for large-scale inverse problems in scientific computing. In this context, key challenges…
The dynamical stability of optimization methods at the vicinity of minima of the loss has recently attracted significant attention. For gradient descent (GD), stable convergence is possible only to minima that are sufficiently flat w.r.t.…
The noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD), caused by minibatch sampling, is poorly understood despite its practical importance in deep learning. This work presents the first systematic study of the SGD noise and fluctuations close to a…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has proven effective in solving many inventory control problems with demand learning. However, it often faces the pitfall of an infeasible target inventory level that is lower than the current inventory…
In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants (Polyak Heavy-Ball and Nesterov) for tracking time-varying optima under strong convexity and smoothness. Our…
Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs) enable expressive hierarchical Bayesian modeling but pose substantial challenges for posterior inference, especially over inducing variables. Denoising diffusion variational inference (DDVI) addresses this by…
We study how the batch size affects the total gradient variance in differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD), seeking a theoretical explanation for the usefulness of large batch sizes. As DP-SGD is the basis of modern DP…
Optimizing noisy functions online, when evaluating the objective requires experiments on a deployed system, is a crucial task arising in manufacturing, robotics and many others. Often, constraints on safe inputs are unknown ahead of time,…
Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) extends traditional variational families with semi-implicit distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. Due to the intractable densities of semi-implicit distributions, classical SIVI often…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…
We consider unbiased estimation of a sparse nonrandom vector corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise. We show that while there are infinitely many unbiased estimators for this problem, none of them has uniformly minimum variance.…
Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) is one of the most prominent algorithms for solving min-max optimization and variational inequalities problems (VIP) appearing in various machine learning tasks. The success of the method led to…
The stochastic gradient (SG) method can minimize an objective function composed of a large number of differentiable functions, or solve a stochastic optimization problem, to a moderate accuracy. The block coordinate descent/update (BCD)…
The success of deep learning has led to a rising interest in the generalization property of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, and stability is one popular approach to study it. Existing works based on stability have studied…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) is emerging as the most promising candidate for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models to large datasets. However, the performance of these methods has been assessed primarily in the…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular optimization method which has been applied to many important machine learning tasks such as Support Vector Machines and Deep Neural Networks. In order to parallelize SGD, minibatch training is…
A framework to boost the efficiency of Bayesian inference in probabilistic programs is introduced by embedding a sampler inside a variational posterior approximation. We call it the refined variational approximation. Its strength lies both…
We present a novel approach to accelerate stochastic gradient descent (SGD) by utilizing curvature information obtained from Hessian-vector products or finite differences of parameters and gradients, similar to the BFGS algorithm. Our…
Understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants is essential for machine learning. However, most of the preceding analyses are conducted under amenable conditions such as unbiased gradient estimator and bounded objective…
Uniform stability is a notion of algorithmic stability that bounds the worst case change in the model output by the algorithm when a single data point in the dataset is replaced. An influential work of Hardt et al. (2016) provides strong…