Related papers: SGD for Variational Inference: Tackling Unbounded …
We study batch normalisation in the context of variational inference methods in Bayesian neural networks, such as mean-field or MC Dropout. We show that batch-normalisation does not affect the optimum of the evidence lower bound (ELBO).…
Black-box alpha (BB-$\alpha$) is a new approximate inference method based on the minimization of $\alpha$-divergences. BB-$\alpha$ scales to large datasets because it can be implemented using stochastic gradient descent. BB-$\alpha$ can be…
We study inference in stochastic block models (SBMs) through the lens of optimal transport (OT). We first establish that maximum likelihood variational inference (MLVI) can be interpreted as a semi-relaxed Gromov-Wasserstein (srGW)…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most important single algorithm in modern machine learning. Although SGD with unbiased gradient estimators has been studied extensively over at least half a century, SGD variants relying on…
Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and variants thereof approximate the objective function's gradient with a small number of training examples, aka the batch size. Small batch sizes require little computation for each model update…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become the method of choice for solving a broad range of machine learning problems. However, some of its learning properties are still not fully understood. We consider least squares learning in…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a widely deployed optimization procedure throughout data-driven and simulation-driven disciplines, which has drawn a substantial interest in understanding its global behavior across a broad class of…
Current state-of-the-art optimizers are adaptive gradient-based optimization methods such as Adam. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in formulating gradient-based optimizers in a probabilistic framework for better modeling the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for minimizing objective functions that arise in machine learning. For constant step-sized SGD, the iterates form a Markov chain on a general state space. Focusing on a class of…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning problems to efficiently perform empirical risk minimization, yet, in practice, SGD is known to stall before reaching the actual minimizer of the empirical risk. SGD…
Stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) is a computationally efficient sampler for Bayesian posterior inference given a large scale dataset. Although SGLD is designed for unbounded random variables, many practical models incorporate…
We propose mS2GD: a method incorporating a mini-batching scheme for improving the theoretical complexity and practical performance of semi-stochastic gradient descent (S2GD). We consider the problem of minimizing a strongly convex function…
This paper studies a risk minimization problem with decision dependent data distribution. The problem pertains to the performative prediction setting in which a trained model can affect the outcome estimated by the model. Such dependency…
We introduce a doubly stochastic proximal gradient algorithm for optimizing a finite average of smooth convex functions, whose gradients depend on numerically expensive expectations. Our main motivation is the acceleration of the…
Gradient optimization algorithms using epochs, that is those based on stochastic gradient descent without replacement (SGDo), are predominantly used to train machine learning models in practice. However, the mathematical theory of SGDo and…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), one of the most fundamental optimization algorithms in machine learning (ML), can be recast through a continuous-time approximation as a Fokker-Planck equation for Langevin dynamics, a viewpoint that has…
While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieve remarkable performance, their tendency to produce overconfident predictions. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) mitigates this by formulating predictions as a Dirichlet distribution over class…
Multi-epoch, small-batch, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been the method of choice for learning with large over-parameterized models. A popular theory for explaining why SGD works well in practice is that the algorithm has an…
Local SGD is a popular optimization method in distributed learning, often outperforming other algorithms in practice, including mini-batch SGD. Despite this success, theoretically proving the dominance of local SGD in settings with…
Variational inference has become a widely used method to approximate posteriors in complex latent variables models. However, deriving a variational inference algorithm generally requires significant model-specific analysis, and these…