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We develop VSD, a method for conditioning a generative model of discrete, combinatorial designs on a rare desired class by efficiently evaluating a black-box (e.g. experiment, simulation) in a batch sequential manner. We call this task…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-24 Daniel M. Steinberg , Rafael Oliveira , Cheng Soon Ong , Edwin V. Bonilla

Bayesian optimal experimental design (BOED) seeks to maximize the expected information gain (EIG) of experiments. This requires a likelihood estimate, which in many settings is intractable. Simulation-based inference (SBI) provides powerful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Samuel Klein , Willie Neiswanger , Daniel Ratner , Michael Kagan , Sean Gasiorowski

Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-21 Justin Domke

This paper theoretically reanalyzes the convergence of the mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for a structured minimization problem involving a finite-sum function with its gradient being stochastically approximated, and an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Runze Li , Jintao Xu , Wenxun Xing

We study the generalization properties of the popular stochastic optimization method known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for optimizing general non-convex loss functions. Our main contribution is providing upper bounds on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Gergely Neu , Gintare Karolina Dziugaite , Mahdi Haghifam , Daniel M. Roy

Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-16 Alberto Bietti , Julien Mairal

Information-theoretic generalization bounds analyze stochastic optimization by relating expected generalization error to the mutual information between learned parameters and training data. Virtual perturbation analyses of SGD add auxiliary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Mohammad Partohaghighi

Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-27 Aurya S. Javeed , Drew P. Kouri , Thomas M. Surowiec

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) or stochastic approximation has been widely used in model training and stochastic optimization. While there is a huge literature on analyzing its convergence, inference on the obtained solutions from SGD…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-01 Henry Lam , Zitong Wang

There is an increasing realization that algorithmic inductive biases are central in preventing overfitting; empirically, we often see a benign overfitting phenomenon in overparameterized settings for natural learning algorithms, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Difan Zou , Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Sham M. Kakade

We show that unconverged stochastic gradient descent can be interpreted as a procedure that samples from a nonparametric variational approximate posterior distribution. This distribution is implicitly defined as the transformation of an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-04-07 Dougal Maclaurin , David Duvenaud , Ryan P. Adams

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a nonparametric particle-based deterministic sampling algorithm. Despite its wide usage, understanding the theoretical properties of SVGD has remained a challenging problem. For sampling from a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Tianle Liu , Promit Ghosal , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Natesh S. Pillai

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-13 Nitish Shirish Keskar , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Jorge Nocedal , Mikhail Smelyanskiy , Ping Tak Peter Tang

We analyze a batched variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with weighted sampling distribution for smooth and non-smooth objective functions. We show that by distributing the batches computationally, a significant speedup in the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-03-02 Deanna Needell , Rachel Ward

In this paper, we investigate the theoretical properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for statistical inference in the context of nonconvex optimization problems, which have been relatively unexplored compared to convex settings.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-06 Yanjie Zhong , Todd Kuffner , Soumendra Lahiri

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been widely used to optimize deep Cox neural network (Cox-NN) by updating model parameters using mini-batches of data. We show that SGD aims to optimize the average of mini-batch…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-16 Lang Zeng , Weijing Tang , Zhao Ren , Ying Ding

Many problems in machine learning are naturally expressed in the language of undirected graphical models. Here, we propose black-box learning and inference algorithms for undirected models that optimize a variational approximation to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-20 Volodymyr Kuleshov , Stefano Ermon

In this project, we propose a Variational Inference algorithm to approximate posterior distributions. Building on prior methods, we develop the Gradient-Steered Stein Variational Gradient Descent (G-SVGD) approach. This method introduces a…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-03 Jose L. Varona-Santana , Marcos A. Capistrán

This work examines the convergence of stochastic gradient-based optimization algorithms that use early stopping based on a validation function. The form of early stopping we consider is that optimization terminates when the norm of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-23 Thomas Flynn , Kwang Min Yu , Abid Malik , Nicolas D'Imperio , Shinjae Yoo

We propose a novel particle-based variational inference method designed to work with multimodal distributions. Our approach, referred to as Branched Stein Variational Gradient Descent (BSVGD), extends the classical Stein Variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Isaías Bañales , Arturo Jaramillo , Joshué Helí Ricalde-Guerrero