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Published work

62 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Tight Generalization Bounds for Noiseless Inverse Optimization

Inverse optimization (IO) seeks to infer the parameters of a decision-maker's objective from observed context--action data. We study noiseless IO, where demonstrations are generated by a ground-truth objective. We provide a high-probability ${O}(\frac{d}{T})$ generalization bound for the induced action set, where $d$ is the number of unknown parameters and $T$ is the size of the training dataset. We strengthen these guarantees under additional conditions that ensure uniqueness of the chosen action, bringing our IO guarantees in line with best-arm identification results in the bandit literature. We further show that the ${O}(\frac{d}{T})$ rate is tight over all consistent estimators considered here, and extend the result to both instantaneous and cumulative regret. Notably, the resulting regret lower bound matches the corresponding upper bounds in the adversarial setting, indicating that the stochastic IO setting is effectively adversarial for the class of estimators studied here. Finally, we propose a parameter-free algorithm with lower per-iteration complexity than generic solvers. Experiments validate the predicted rates and illustrate the tightness of our bounds.

preprint2026arXiv

Trees to Flows and Back: Unifying Decision Trees and Diffusion Models

Decision trees and diffusion models are ostensibly disparate model classes, one discrete and hierarchical, the other continuous and dynamic. This work unifies the two by establishing a crisp mathematical correspondence between hierarchical decision trees and diffusion processes in appropriate limiting regimes. Our unification reveals a shared optimization principle: \emph{Global Trajectory Score Matching (GTSM)}, for which gradient boosting (in an idealized version) is asymptotically optimal. We underscore the conceptual value of our work through two key practical instantiations: \treeflow, which achieves competitive generation quality on tabular data with higher fidelity and a 2\times computational speedup, and \dsmtree, a novel distillation method that transfers hierarchical decision logic into neural networks, matching teacher performance within 2\% on many benchmarks.

preprint2023arXiv

The Hornich-Hlawka functional inequality for functions with positive differences

We analyze the role played by $n$-convexity for the fulfillment of a series of linear functional inequalities that extend the Hornich-Hlawka functional inequality, $f\left( x\right) +f\left( y\right) +f\left( z\right) +f\left( x+y+z\right) \geq f\left( x+y\right) +f\left( y+z\right)+f\left( z+x\right) +f(0),$ including extensions to the case of positive operators.

preprint2022arXiv

Beyond Worst-Case Analysis in Stochastic Approximation: Moment Estimation Improves Instance Complexity

We study oracle complexity of gradient based methods for stochastic approximation problems. Though in many settings optimal algorithms and tight lower bounds are known for such problems, these optimal algorithms do not achieve the best performance when used in practice. We address this theory-practice gap by focusing on instance-dependent complexity instead of worst case complexity. In particular, we first summarize known instance-dependent complexity results and categorize them into three levels. We identify the domination relation between different levels and propose a fourth instance-dependent bound that dominates existing ones. We then provide a sufficient condition according to which an adaptive algorithm with moment estimation can achieve the proposed bound without knowledge of noise levels. Our proposed algorithm and its analysis provide a theoretical justification for the success of moment estimation as it achieves improved instance complexity.

preprint2022arXiv

CCCP is Frank-Wolfe in disguise

This paper uncovers a simple but rather surprising connection: it shows that the well-known convex-concave procedure (CCCP) and its generalization to constrained problems are both special cases of the Frank-Wolfe (FW) method. This connection not only provides insight of deep (in our opinion) pedagogical value, but also transfers the recently discovered convergence theory of nonconvex Frank-Wolfe methods immediately to CCCP, closing a long-standing gap in its non-asymptotic convergence theory. We hope the viewpoint uncovered by this paper spurs the transfer of other advances made for FW to both CCCP and its generalizations.

preprint2022arXiv

Introducing Discrepancy Values of Matrices with Application to Bounding Norms of Commutators

We introduce discrepancy values, quantities inspired by the notion of the spectral spread of Hermitian matrices. We define them as the discrepancy between two consecutive Ky-Fan-like seminorms. As a result, discrepancy values share many properties with singular values and eigenvalues, yet are substantially different to merit their own study. We describe key properties of discrepancy values, and establish several tools such as representation theorems, majorization inequalities, convex formulations, etc., for working with them. As an important application, we illustrate the role of discrepancy values in deriving tight bounds on the norms of commutators.

preprint2022arXiv

Minibatch vs Local SGD with Shuffling: Tight Convergence Bounds and Beyond

In distributed learning, local SGD (also known as federated averaging) and its simple baseline minibatch SGD are widely studied optimization methods. Most existing analyses of these methods assume independent and unbiased gradient estimates obtained via with-replacement sampling. In contrast, we study shuffling-based variants: minibatch and local Random Reshuffling, which draw stochastic gradients without replacement and are thus closer to practice. For smooth functions satisfying the Polyak-Łojasiewicz condition, we obtain convergence bounds (in the large epoch regime) which show that these shuffling-based variants converge faster than their with-replacement counterparts. Moreover, we prove matching lower bounds showing that our convergence analysis is tight. Finally, we propose an algorithmic modification called synchronized shuffling that leads to convergence rates faster than our lower bounds in near-homogeneous settings.

preprint2022arXiv

Neural Network Weights Do Not Converge to Stationary Points: An Invariant Measure Perspective

This work examines the deep disconnect between existing theoretical analyses of gradient-based algorithms and the practice of training deep neural networks. Specifically, we provide numerical evidence that in large-scale neural network training (e.g., ImageNet + ResNet101, and WT103 + TransformerXL models), the neural network's weights do not converge to stationary points where the gradient of the loss is zero. Remarkably, however, we observe that even though the weights do not converge to stationary points, the progress in minimizing the loss function halts and training loss stabilizes. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new perspective based on ergodic theory of dynamical systems to explain it. Rather than studying the evolution of weights, we study the evolution of the distribution of weights. We prove convergence of the distribution of weights to an approximate invariant measure, thereby explaining how the training loss can stabilize without weights necessarily converging to stationary points. We further discuss how this perspective can better align optimization theory with empirical observations in machine learning practice.

preprint2022arXiv

Three Operator Splitting with Subgradients, Stochastic Gradients, and Adaptive Learning Rates

Three Operator Splitting (TOS) (Davis & Yin, 2017) can minimize the sum of multiple convex functions effectively when an efficient gradient oracle or proximal operator is available for each term. This requirement often fails in machine learning applications: (i) instead of full gradients only stochastic gradients may be available; and (ii) instead of proximal operators, using subgradients to handle complex penalty functions may be more efficient and realistic. Motivated by these concerns, we analyze three potentially valuable extensions of TOS. The first two permit using subgradients and stochastic gradients, and are shown to ensure a $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{t})$ convergence rate. The third extension AdapTOS endows TOS with adaptive step-sizes. For the important setting of optimizing a convex loss over the intersection of convex sets AdapTOS attains universal convergence rates, i.e., the rate adapts to the unknown smoothness degree of the objective. We compare our proposed methods with competing methods on various applications.

preprint2022arXiv

Understanding Nesterov's Acceleration via Proximal Point Method

The proximal point method (PPM) is a fundamental method in optimization that is often used as a building block for designing optimization algorithms. In this work, we use the PPM method to provide conceptually simple derivations along with convergence analyses of different versions of Nesterov's accelerated gradient method (AGM). The key observation is that AGM is a simple approximation of PPM, which results in an elementary derivation of the update equations and stepsizes of AGM. This view also leads to a transparent and conceptually simple analysis of AGM's convergence by using the analysis of PPM. The derivations also naturally extend to the strongly convex case. Ultimately, the results presented in this paper are of both didactic and conceptual value; they unify and explain existing variants of AGM while motivating other accelerated methods for practically relevant settings.

preprint2022arXiv

Understanding Riemannian Acceleration via a Proximal Extragradient Framework

We contribute to advancing the understanding of Riemannian accelerated gradient methods. In particular, we revisit Accelerated Hybrid Proximal Extragradient(A-HPE), a powerful framework for obtaining Euclidean accelerated methods \citep{monteiro2013accelerated}. Building on A-HPE, we then propose and analyze Riemannian A-HPE. The core of our analysis consists of two key components: (i) a set of new insights into Euclidean A-HPE itself; and (ii) a careful control of metric distortion caused by Riemannian geometry. We illustrate our framework by obtaining a few existing and new Riemannian accelerated gradient methods as special cases, while characterizing their acceleration as corollaries of our main results.

preprint2022arXiv

Understanding the unstable convergence of gradient descent

Most existing analyses of (stochastic) gradient descent rely on the condition that for $L$-smooth costs, the step size is less than $2/L$. However, many works have observed that in machine learning applications step sizes often do not fulfill this condition, yet (stochastic) gradient descent still converges, albeit in an unstable manner. We investigate this unstable convergence phenomenon from first principles, and discuss key causes behind it. We also identify its main characteristics, and how they interrelate based on both theory and experiments, offering a principled view toward understanding the phenomenon.

preprint2021arXiv

Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples

How can you sample good negative examples for contrastive learning? We argue that, as with metric learning, contrastive learning of representations benefits from hard negative samples (i.e., points that are difficult to distinguish from an anchor point). The key challenge toward using hard negatives is that contrastive methods must remain unsupervised, making it infeasible to adopt existing negative sampling strategies that use true similarity information. In response, we develop a new family of unsupervised sampling methods for selecting hard negative samples where the user can control the hardness. A limiting case of this sampling results in a representation that tightly clusters each class, and pushes different classes as far apart as possible. The proposed method improves downstream performance across multiple modalities, requires only few additional lines of code to implement, and introduces no computational overhead.

preprint2021arXiv

Online Learning in Unknown Markov Games

We study online learning in unknown Markov games, a problem that arises in episodic multi-agent reinforcement learning where the actions of the opponents are unobservable. We show that in this challenging setting, achieving sublinear regret against the best response in hindsight is statistically hard. We then consider a weaker notion of regret by competing with the \emph{minimax value} of the game, and present an algorithm that achieves a sublinear $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(K^{2/3})$ regret after $K$ episodes. This is the first sublinear regret bound (to our knowledge) for online learning in unknown Markov games. Importantly, our regret bound is independent of the size of the opponents' action spaces. As a result, even when the opponents' actions are fully observable, our regret bound improves upon existing analysis (e.g., (Xie et al., 2020)) by an exponential factor in the number of opponents.

preprint2021arXiv

Provably Efficient Algorithms for Multi-Objective Competitive RL

We study multi-objective reinforcement learning (RL) where an agent's reward is represented as a vector. In settings where an agent competes against opponents, its performance is measured by the distance of its average return vector to a target set. We develop statistically and computationally efficient algorithms to approach the associated target set. Our results extend Blackwell's approachability theorem (Blackwell, 1956) to tabular RL, where strategic exploration becomes essential. The algorithms presented are adaptive; their guarantees hold even without Blackwell's approachability condition. If the opponents use fixed policies, we give an improved rate of approaching the target set while also tackling the more ambitious goal of simultaneously minimizing a scalar cost function. We discuss our analysis for this special case by relating our results to previous works on constrained RL. To our knowledge, this work provides the first provably efficient algorithms for vector-valued Markov games and our theoretical guarantees are near-optimal.

preprint2021arXiv

Time varying regression with hidden linear dynamics

We revisit a model for time-varying linear regression that assumes the unknown parameters evolve according to a linear dynamical system. Counterintuitively, we show that when the underlying dynamics are stable the parameters of this model can be estimated from data by combining just two ordinary least squares estimates. We offer a finite sample guarantee on the estimation error of our method and discuss certain advantages it has over Expectation-Maximization (EM), which is the main approach proposed by prior work.

preprint2021arXiv

Why do classifier accuracies show linear trends under distribution shift?

Recent studies of generalization in deep learning have observed a puzzling trend: accuracies of models on one data distribution are approximately linear functions of the accuracies on another distribution. We explain this trend under an intuitive assumption on model similarity, which was verified empirically in prior work. More precisely, we assume the probability that two models agree in their predictions is higher than what we can infer from their accuracy levels alone. Then, we show that a linear trend must occur when evaluating models on two distributions unless the size of the distribution shift is large. This work emphasizes the value of understanding model similarity, which can have an impact on the generalization and robustness of classification models.

preprint2020arXiv

Complexity of Finding Stationary Points of Nonsmooth Nonconvex Functions

We provide the first non-asymptotic analysis for finding stationary points of nonsmooth, nonconvex functions. In particular, we study the class of Hadamard semi-differentiable functions, perhaps the largest class of nonsmooth functions for which the chain rule of calculus holds. This class contains examples such as ReLU neural networks and others with non-differentiable activation functions. We first show that finding an $ε$-stationary point with first-order methods is impossible in finite time. We then introduce the notion of $(δ, ε)$-stationarity, which allows for an $ε$-approximate gradient to be the convex combination of generalized gradients evaluated at points within distance $δ$ to the solution. We propose a series of randomized first-order methods and analyze their complexity of finding a $(δ, ε)$-stationary point. Furthermore, we provide a lower bound and show that our stochastic algorithm has min-max optimal dependence on $δ$. Empirically, our methods perform well for training ReLU neural networks.

preprint2020arXiv

Escaping Saddle Points with Adaptive Gradient Methods

Adaptive methods such as Adam and RMSProp are widely used in deep learning but are not well understood. In this paper, we seek a crisp, clean and precise characterization of their behavior in nonconvex settings. To this end, we first provide a novel view of adaptive methods as preconditioned SGD, where the preconditioner is estimated in an online manner. By studying the preconditioner on its own, we elucidate its purpose: it rescales the stochastic gradient noise to be isotropic near stationary points, which helps escape saddle points. Furthermore, we show that adaptive methods can efficiently estimate the aforementioned preconditioner. By gluing together these two components, we provide the first (to our knowledge) second-order convergence result for any adaptive method. The key insight from our analysis is that, compared to SGD, adaptive methods escape saddle points faster, and can converge faster overall to second-order stationary points.

preprint2020arXiv

From Nesterov's Estimate Sequence to Riemannian Acceleration

We propose the first global accelerated gradient method for Riemannian manifolds. Toward establishing our result we revisit Nesterov's estimate sequence technique and develop an alternative analysis for it that may also be of independent interest. Then, we extend this analysis to the Riemannian setting, localizing the key difficulty due to non-Euclidean structure into a certain ``metric distortion.'' We control this distortion by developing a novel geometric inequality, which permits us to propose and analyze a Riemannian counterpart to Nesterov's accelerated gradient method.

preprint2020arXiv

On Tight Convergence Rates of Without-replacement SGD

For solving finite-sum optimization problems, SGD without replacement sampling is empirically shown to outperform SGD. Denoting by $n$ the number of components in the cost and $K$ the number of epochs of the algorithm , several recent works have shown convergence rates of without-replacement SGD that have better dependency on $n$ and $K$ than the baseline rate of $O(1/(nK))$ for SGD. However, there are two main limitations shared among those works: the rates have extra poly-logarithmic factors on $nK$, and denoting by $κ$ the condition number of the problem, the rates hold after $κ^c\log(nK)$ epochs for some $c>0$. In this work, we overcome these limitations by analyzing step sizes that vary across epochs.

preprint2020arXiv

SGD with shuffling: optimal rates without component convexity and large epoch requirements

We study without-replacement SGD for solving finite-sum optimization problems. Specifically, depending on how the indices of the finite-sum are shuffled, we consider the RandomShuffle (shuffle at the beginning of each epoch) and SingleShuffle (shuffle only once) algorithms. First, we establish minimax optimal convergence rates of these algorithms up to poly-log factors. Notably, our analysis is general enough to cover gradient dominated nonconvex costs, and does not rely on the convexity of individual component functions unlike existing optimal convergence results. Secondly, assuming convexity of the individual components, we further sharpen the tight convergence results for RandomShuffle by removing the drawbacks common to all prior arts: large number of epochs required for the results to hold, and extra poly-log factor gaps to the lower bound.

preprint2020arXiv

Strength from Weakness: Fast Learning Using Weak Supervision

We study generalization properties of weakly supervised learning. That is, learning where only a few "strong" labels (the actual target of our prediction) are present but many more "weak" labels are available. In particular, we show that having access to weak labels can significantly accelerate the learning rate for the strong task to the fast rate of $\mathcal{O}(\nicefrac1n)$, where $n$ denotes the number of strongly labeled data points. This acceleration can happen even if by itself the strongly labeled data admits only the slower $\mathcal{O}(\nicefrac{1}{\sqrt{n}})$ rate. The actual acceleration depends continuously on the number of weak labels available, and on the relation between the two tasks. Our theoretical results are reflected empirically across a range of tasks and illustrate how weak labels speed up learning on the strong task.

preprint2020arXiv

Towards Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning in Factored Markov Decision Processes

We study minimax optimal reinforcement learning in episodic factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs), which are MDPs with conditionally independent transition components. Assuming the factorization is known, we propose two model-based algorithms. The first one achieves minimax optimal regret guarantees for a rich class of factored structures, while the second one enjoys better computational complexity with a slightly worse regret. A key new ingredient of our algorithms is the design of a bonus term to guide exploration. We complement our algorithms by presenting several structure-dependent lower bounds on regret for FMDPs that reveal the difficulty hiding in the intricacy of the structures.

preprint2020arXiv

Why gradient clipping accelerates training: A theoretical justification for adaptivity

We provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of gradient clipping in training deep neural networks. The key ingredient is a new smoothness condition derived from practical neural network training examples. We observe that gradient smoothness, a concept central to the analysis of first-order optimization algorithms that is often assumed to be a constant, demonstrates significant variability along the training trajectory of deep neural networks. Further, this smoothness positively correlates with the gradient norm, and contrary to standard assumptions in the literature, it can grow with the norm of the gradient. These empirical observations limit the applicability of existing theoretical analyses of algorithms that rely on a fixed bound on smoothness. These observations motivate us to introduce a novel relaxation of gradient smoothness that is weaker than the commonly used Lipschitz smoothness assumption. Under the new condition, we prove that two popular methods, namely, \emph{gradient clipping} and \emph{normalized gradient}, converge arbitrarily faster than gradient descent with fixed stepsize. We further explain why such adaptively scaled gradient methods can accelerate empirical convergence and verify our results empirically in popular neural network training settings.

preprint2016arXiv

Combinatorial Topic Models using Small-Variance Asymptotics

Topic models have emerged as fundamental tools in unsupervised machine learning. Most modern topic modeling algorithms take a probabilistic view and derive inference algorithms based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) or its variants. In contrast, we study topic modeling as a combinatorial optimization problem, and propose a new objective function derived from LDA by passing to the small-variance limit. We minimize the derived objective by using ideas from combinatorial optimization, which results in a new, fast, and high-quality topic modeling algorithm. In particular, we show that our results are competitive with popular LDA-based topic modeling approaches, and also discuss the (dis)similarities between our approach and its probabilistic counterparts.

preprint2016arXiv

Directional Statistics in Machine Learning: a Brief Review

The modern data analyst must cope with data encoded in various forms, vectors, matrices, strings, graphs, or more. Consequently, statistical and machine learning models tailored to different data encodings are important. We focus on data encoded as normalized vectors, so that their "direction" is more important than their magnitude. Specifically, we consider high-dimensional vectors that lie either on the surface of the unit hypersphere or on the real projective plane. For such data, we briefly review common mathematical models prevalent in machine learning, while also outlining some technical aspects, software, applications, and open mathematical challenges.

preprint2016arXiv

Efficient Sampling for k-Determinantal Point Processes

Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) are elegant probabilistic models of repulsion and diversity over discrete sets of items. But their applicability to large sets is hindered by expensive cubic-complexity matrix operations for basic tasks such as sampling. In light of this, we propose a new method for approximate sampling from discrete $k$-DPPs. Our method takes advantage of the diversity property of subsets sampled from a DPP, and proceeds in two stages: first it constructs coresets for the ground set of items; thereafter, it efficiently samples subsets based on the constructed coresets. As opposed to previous approaches, our algorithm aims to minimize the total variation distance to the original distribution. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets indicate that our sampling algorithm works efficiently on large data sets, and yields more accurate samples than previous approaches.

preprint2016arXiv

Fast DPP Sampling for Nyström with Application to Kernel Methods

The Nyström method has long been popular for scaling up kernel methods. Its theoretical guarantees and empirical performance rely critically on the quality of the landmarks selected. We study landmark selection for Nyström using Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs), discrete probability models that allow tractable generation of diverse samples. We prove that landmarks selected via DPPs guarantee bounds on approximation errors; subsequently, we analyze implications for kernel ridge regression. Contrary to prior reservations due to cubic complexity of DPPsampling, we show that (under certain conditions) Markov chain DPP sampling requires only linear time in the size of the data. We present several empirical results that support our theoretical analysis, and demonstrate the superior performance of DPP-based landmark selection compared with existing approaches.

preprint2016arXiv

Fast Incremental Method for Nonconvex Optimization

We analyze a fast incremental aggregated gradient method for optimizing nonconvex problems of the form $\min_x \sum_i f_i(x)$. Specifically, we analyze the SAGA algorithm within an Incremental First-order Oracle framework, and show that it converges to a stationary point provably faster than both gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent. We also discuss a Polyak's special class of nonconvex problems for which SAGA converges at a linear rate to the global optimum. Finally, we analyze the practically valuable regularized and minibatch variants of SAGA. To our knowledge, this paper presents the first analysis of fast convergence for an incremental aggregated gradient method for nonconvex problems.

preprint2016arXiv

Fast Stochastic Methods for Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization

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 is very limited. For example, it is not known whether the proximal stochastic gradient method with constant minibatch converges to a stationary point. To tackle this issue, we develop fast stochastic algorithms that provably converge to a stationary point for constant minibatches. Furthermore, using a variant of these algorithms, we show provably faster convergence than batch proximal gradient descent. Finally, we prove global linear convergence rate for an interesting subclass of nonsmooth nonconvex functions, that subsumes several recent works. This paper builds upon our recent series of papers on fast stochastic methods for smooth nonconvex optimization [22, 23], with a novel analysis for nonconvex and nonsmooth functions.

preprint2016arXiv

First-order Methods for Geodesically Convex Optimization

Geodesic convexity generalizes the notion of (vector space) convexity to nonlinear metric spaces. But unlike convex optimization, geodesically convex (g-convex) optimization is much less developed. In this paper we contribute to the understanding of g-convex optimization by developing iteration complexity analysis for several first-order algorithms on Hadamard manifolds. Specifically, we prove upper bounds for the global complexity of deterministic and stochastic (sub)gradient methods for optimizing smooth and nonsmooth g-convex functions, both with and without strong g-convexity. Our analysis also reveals how the manifold geometry, especially \emph{sectional curvature}, impacts convergence rates. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to provide global complexity analysis for first-order algorithms for general g-convex optimization.

preprint2016arXiv

Gauss quadrature for matrix inverse forms with applications

We present a framework for accelerating a spectrum of machine learning algorithms that require computation of bilinear inverse forms $u^\top A^{-1}u$, where $A$ is a positive definite matrix and $u$ a given vector. Our framework is built on Gauss-type quadrature and easily scales to large, sparse matrices. Further, it allows retrospective computation of lower and upper bounds on $u^\top A^{-1}u$, which in turn accelerates several algorithms. We prove that these bounds tighten iteratively and converge at a linear (geometric) rate. To our knowledge, ours is the first work to demonstrate these key properties of Gauss-type quadrature, which is a classical and deeply studied topic. We illustrate empirical consequences of our results by using quadrature to accelerate machine learning tasks involving determinantal point processes and submodular optimization, and observe tremendous speedups in several instances.

preprint2016arXiv

Geometric Mean Metric Learning

We revisit the task of learning a Euclidean metric from data. We approach this problem from first principles and formulate it as a surprisingly simple optimization problem. Indeed, our formulation even admits a closed form solution. This solution possesses several very attractive properties: (i) an innate geometric appeal through the Riemannian geometry of positive definite matrices; (ii) ease of interpretability; and (iii) computational speed several orders of magnitude faster than the widely used LMNN and ITML methods. Furthermore, on standard benchmark datasets, our closed-form solution consistently attains higher classification accuracy.

preprint2016arXiv

Kronecker Determinantal Point Processes

Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) are probabilistic models over all subsets a ground set of $N$ items. They have recently gained prominence in several applications that rely on "diverse" subsets. However, their applicability to large problems is still limited due to the $\mathcal O(N^3)$ complexity of core tasks such as sampling and learning. We enable efficient sampling and learning for DPPs by introducing KronDPP, a DPP model whose kernel matrix decomposes as a tensor product of multiple smaller kernel matrices. This decomposition immediately enables fast exact sampling. But contrary to what one may expect, leveraging the Kronecker product structure for speeding up DPP learning turns out to be more difficult. We overcome this challenge, and derive batch and stochastic optimization algorithms for efficiently learning the parameters of a KronDPP.

preprint2016arXiv

On Variance Reduction in Stochastic Gradient Descent and its Asynchronous Variants

We study optimization algorithms based on variance reduction for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Remarkable recent progress has been made in this direction through development of algorithms like SAG, SVRG, SAGA. These algorithms have been shown to outperform SGD, both theoretically and empirically. However, asynchronous versions of these algorithms---a crucial requirement for modern large-scale applications---have not been studied. We bridge this gap by presenting a unifying framework for many variance reduction techniques. Subsequently, we propose an asynchronous algorithm grounded in our framework, and prove its fast convergence. An important consequence of our general approach is that it yields asynchronous versions of variance reduction algorithms such as SVRG and SAGA as a byproduct. Our method achieves near linear speedup in sparse settings common to machine learning. We demonstrate the empirical performance of our method through a concrete realization of asynchronous SVRG.

preprint2016arXiv

Parallel and Distributed Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe Algorithms

We develop parallel and distributed Frank-Wolfe algorithms; the former on shared memory machines with mini-batching, and the latter in a delayed update framework. Whenever possible, we perform computations asynchronously, which helps attain speedups on multicore machines as well as in distributed environments. Moreover, instead of worst-case bounded delays, our methods only depend (mildly) on \emph{expected} delays, allowing them to be robust to stragglers and faulty worker threads. Our algorithms assume block-separable constraints, and subsume the recent Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe (BCFW) method~\citep{lacoste2013block}. Our analysis reveals problem-dependent quantities that govern the speedups of our methods over BCFW. We present experiments on structural SVM and Group Fused Lasso, obtaining significant speedups over competing state-of-the-art (and synchronous) methods.

preprint2016arXiv

Stochastic Frank-Wolfe Methods for Nonconvex Optimization

We study Frank-Wolfe methods for nonconvex stochastic and finite-sum optimization problems. Frank-Wolfe methods (in the convex case) have gained tremendous recent interest in machine learning and optimization communities due to their projection-free property and their ability to exploit structured constraints. However, our understanding of these algorithms in the nonconvex setting is fairly limited. In this paper, we propose nonconvex stochastic Frank-Wolfe methods and analyze their convergence properties. For objective functions that decompose into a finite-sum, we leverage ideas from variance reduction techniques for convex optimization to obtain new variance reduced nonconvex Frank-Wolfe methods that have provably faster convergence than the classical Frank-Wolfe method. Finally, we show that the faster convergence rates of our variance reduced methods also translate into improved convergence rates for the stochastic setting.

preprint2016arXiv

Stochastic Variance Reduction for Nonconvex Optimization

We study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient descent (SGD); but their theoretical analysis almost exclusively assumes convexity. In contrast, we prove non-asymptotic rates of convergence (to stationary points) of SVRG for nonconvex optimization, and show that it is provably faster than SGD and gradient descent. We also analyze a subclass of nonconvex problems on which SVRG attains linear convergence to the global optimum. We extend our analysis to mini-batch variants of SVRG, showing (theoretical) linear speedup due to mini-batching in parallel settings.

preprint2015arXiv

AdaDelay: Delay Adaptive Distributed Stochastic Convex Optimization

We study distributed stochastic convex optimization under the delayed gradient model where the server nodes perform parameter updates, while the worker nodes compute stochastic gradients. We discuss, analyze, and experiment with a setup motivated by the behavior of real-world distributed computation networks, where the machines are differently slow at different time. Therefore, we allow the parameter updates to be sensitive to the actual delays experienced, rather than to worst-case bounds on the maximum delay. This sensitivity leads to larger stepsizes, that can help gain rapid initial convergence without having to wait too long for slower machines, while maintaining the same asymptotic complexity. We obtain encouraging improvements to overall convergence for distributed experiments on real datasets with up to billions of examples and features.

preprint2015arXiv

Convex Optimization for Parallel Energy Minimization

Energy minimization has been an intensely studied core problem in computer vision. With growing image sizes (2D and 3D), it is now highly desirable to run energy minimization algorithms in parallel. But many existing algorithms, in particular, some efficient combinatorial algorithms, are difficult to par-allelize. By exploiting results from convex and submodular theory, we reformulate the quadratic energy minimization problem as a total variation denoising problem, which, when viewed geometrically, enables the use of projection and reflection based convex methods. The resulting min-cut algorithm (and code) is conceptually very simple, and solves a sequence of TV denoising problems. We perform an extensive empirical evaluation comparing state-of-the-art combinatorial algorithms and convex optimization techniques. On small problems the iterative convex methods match the combinatorial max-flow algorithms, while on larger problems they offer other flexibility and important gains: (a) their memory footprint is small; (b) their straightforward parallelizability fits multi-core platforms; (c) they can easily be warm-started; and (d) they quickly reach approximately good solutions, thereby enabling faster "inexact" solutions. A key consequence of our approach based on submodularity and convexity is that it is allows to combine any arbitrary combinatorial or convex methods as subroutines, which allows one to obtain hybrid combinatorial and convex optimization algorithms that benefit from the strengths of both.

preprint2015arXiv

Efficient Structured Matrix Rank Minimization

We study the problem of finding structured low-rank matrices using nuclear norm regularization where the structure is encoded by a linear map. In contrast to most known approaches for linearly structured rank minimization, we do not (a) use the full SVD, nor (b) resort to augmented Lagrangian techniques, nor (c) solve linear systems per iteration. Instead, we formulate the problem differently so that it is amenable to a generalized conditional gradient method, which results in a practical improvement with low per iteration computational cost. Numerical results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in terms of running time, while effectively recovering low rank solutions in stochastic system realization and spectral compressed sensing problems.

preprint2015arXiv

Fixed-point algorithms for learning determinantal point processes

Determinantal point processes (DPPs) offer an elegant tool for encoding probabilities over subsets of a ground set. Discrete DPPs are parametrized by a positive semidefinite matrix (called the DPP kernel), and estimating this kernel is key to learning DPPs from observed data. We consider the task of learning the DPP kernel, and develop for it a surprisingly simple yet effective new algorithm. Our algorithm offers the following benefits over previous approaches: (a) it is much simpler; (b) it yields equally good and sometimes even better local maxima; and (c) it runs an order of magnitude faster on large problems. We present experimental results on both real and simulated data to illustrate the numerical performance of our technique.

preprint2015arXiv

Large-scale randomized-coordinate descent methods with non-separable linear constraints

We develop randomized (block) coordinate descent (CD) methods for linearly constrained convex optimization. Unlike most CD methods, we do not assume the constraints to be separable, but let them be coupled linearly. To our knowledge, ours is the first CD method that allows linear coupling constraints, without making the global iteration complexity have an exponential dependence on the number of constraints. We present algorithms and analysis for four key problem scenarios: (i) smooth; (ii) smooth + nonsmooth separable; (iii) asynchronous parallel; and (iv) stochastic. We illustrate empirical behavior of our algorithms by simulation experiments.

preprint2015arXiv

Manifold Optimization for Gaussian Mixture Models

We take a new look at parameter estimation for Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). In particular, we propose using \emph{Riemannian manifold optimization} as a powerful counterpart to Expectation Maximization (EM). An out-of-the-box invocation of manifold optimization, however, fails spectacularly: it converges to the same solution but vastly slower. Driven by intuition from manifold convexity, we then propose a reparamerization that has remarkable empirical consequences. It makes manifold optimization not only match EM---a highly encouraging result in itself given the poor record nonlinear programming methods have had against EM so far---but also outperform EM in many practical settings, while displaying much less variability in running times. We further highlight the strengths of manifold optimization by developing a somewhat tuned manifold LBFGS method that proves even more competitive and reliable than existing manifold optimization tools. We hope that our results encourage a wider consideration of manifold optimization for parameter estimation problems.

preprint2015arXiv

On inequalities for normalized Schur functions

We prove a conjecture of Cuttler et al.~[2011] [A. Cuttler, C. Greene, and M. Skandera; \emph{Inequalities for symmetric means}. European J. Combinatorics, 32(2011), 745--761] on the monotonicity of \emph{normalized Schur functions} under the usual (dominance) partial-order on partitions. We believe that our proof technique may be helpful in obtaining similar inequalities for other symmetric functions.

preprint2015arXiv

On the matrix square root via geometric optimization

This paper is triggered by the preprint "\emph{Computing Matrix Squareroot via Non Convex Local Search}" by Jain et al. (\textit{\textcolor{blue}{arXiv:1507.05854}}), which analyzes gradient-descent for computing the square root of a positive definite matrix. Contrary to claims of~\citet{jain2015}, our experiments reveal that Newton-like methods compute matrix square roots rapidly and reliably, even for highly ill-conditioned matrices and without requiring commutativity. We observe that gradient-descent converges very slowly primarily due to tiny step-sizes and ill-conditioning. We derive an alternative first-order method based on geodesic convexity: our method admits a transparent convergence analysis ($< 1$ page), attains linear rate, and displays reliable convergence even for rank deficient problems. Though superior to gradient-descent, ultimately our method is also outperformed by a well-known scaled Newton method. Nevertheless, the primary value of our work is its conceptual value: it shows that for deriving gradient based methods for the matrix square root, \emph{the manifold geometric view of positive definite matrices can be much more advantageous than the Euclidean view}.

preprint2015arXiv

Riemannian Dictionary Learning and Sparse Coding for Positive Definite Matrices

Data encoded as symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices frequently arise in many areas of computer vision and machine learning. While these matrices form an open subset of the Euclidean space of symmetric matrices, viewing them through the lens of non-Euclidean Riemannian geometry often turns out to be better suited in capturing several desirable data properties. However, formulating classical machine learning algorithms within such a geometry is often non-trivial and computationally expensive. Inspired by the great success of dictionary learning and sparse coding for vector-valued data, our goal in this paper is to represent data in the form of SPD matrices as sparse conic combinations of SPD atoms from a learned dictionary via a Riemannian geometric approach. To that end, we formulate a novel Riemannian optimization objective for dictionary learning and sparse coding in which the representation loss is characterized via the affine invariant Riemannian metric. We also present a computationally simple algorithm for optimizing our model. Experiments on several computer vision datasets demonstrate superior classification and retrieval performance using our approach when compared to sparse coding via alternative non-Riemannian formulations.

preprint2015arXiv

The sum of squared logarithms inequality in arbitrary dimensions

We prove the \emph{sum of squared logarithms inequality} (SSLI) which states that for nonnegative vectors $x, y \in \mathbb{R}^n$ whose elementary symmetric polynomials satisfy $e_k(x)\le e_k(y)$ (for $1\le k < n$) and $e_n(x)=e_n(y)$, the inequality $\sum_i (\log x_i)^2 \le \sum_i (\log y_i)^2$ holds. Our proof of this inequality follows by a suitable extension to the complex plane. In particular, we show that the function $f\colon M\subseteq \mathbb{C}^n\to \mathbb{R}$ with $f(z)=\sum_i(\log z_i)^2$ has nonnegative partial derivatives with respect to the elementary symmetric polynomials of $z$. This property leads to our proof. We conclude by providing applications and wider connections of the SSLI.

preprint2014arXiv

Completely strong superadditivity of generalized matrix functions

We prove that generalized matrix functions satisfy a block-matrix strong superadditivity inequality over the cone of positive semidefinite matrices. Our result extends a recent result of Paksoy-Turkmen-Zhang (V. Paksoy, R. Turkmen, F. Zhang, Inequalities of generalized matrix functions via tensor products, Electron. J. Linear Algebra 27 (2014) 332-341.). As an application, we obtain a short proof of a classical inequality of Thompson (1961) on block matrix determinants.

preprint2014arXiv

Hlawka-Popoviciu inequalities on positive definite tensors

We prove inequalities on symmetric tensor sums of positive definite operators. In particular, we prove multivariable operator inequalities inspired by generalizations to the well-known Hlawka and Popoviciu inequalities. As corollaries, we obtain generalized Hlawka and Popoviciu inequalities for determinants, permanents, and generalized matrix functions. The new operator inequalities and their corollaries contain a few recently published inequalities on positive definite matrices as special cases.

preprint2014arXiv

Randomized Nonlinear Component Analysis

Classical methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) are ubiquitous in statistics. However, these techniques are only able to reveal linear relationships in data. Although nonlinear variants of PCA and CCA have been proposed, these are computationally prohibitive in the large scale. In a separate strand of recent research, randomized methods have been proposed to construct features that help reveal nonlinear patterns in data. For basic tasks such as regression or classification, random features exhibit little or no loss in performance, while achieving drastic savings in computational requirements. In this paper we leverage randomness to design scalable new variants of nonlinear PCA and CCA; our ideas extend to key multivariate analysis tools such as spectral clustering or LDA. We demonstrate our algorithms through experiments on real-world data, on which we compare against the state-of-the-art. A simple R implementation of the presented algorithms is provided.

preprint2013arXiv

Positive definite matrices and the S-divergence

Positive definite matrices abound in a dazzling variety of applications. This ubiquity can be in part attributed to their rich geometric structure: positive definite matrices form a self-dual convex cone whose strict interior is a Riemannian manifold. The manifold view is endowed with a "natural" distance function while the conic view is not. Nevertheless, drawing motivation from the conic view, we introduce the S-Divergence as a "natural" distance-like function on the open cone of positive definite matrices. We motivate the S-divergence via a sequence of results that connect it to the Riemannian distance. In particular, we show that (a) this divergence is the square of a distance; and (b) that it has several geometric properties similar to those of the Riemannian distance, though without being computationally as demanding. The S-divergence is even more intriguing: although nonconvex, we can still compute matrix means and medians using it to global optimality. We complement our results with some numerical experiments illustrating our theorems and our optimization algorithm for computing matrix medians.

preprint2013arXiv

Reflection methods for user-friendly submodular optimization

Recently, it has become evident that submodularity naturally captures widely occurring concepts in machine learning, signal processing and computer vision. Consequently, there is need for efficient optimization procedures for submodular functions, especially for minimization problems. While general submodular minimization is challenging, we propose a new method that exploits existing decomposability of submodular functions. In contrast to previous approaches, our method is neither approximate, nor impractical, nor does it need any cumbersome parameter tuning. Moreover, it is easy to implement and parallelize. A key component of our method is a formulation of the discrete submodular minimization problem as a continuous best approximation problem that is solved through a sequence of reflections, and its solution can be easily thresholded to obtain an optimal discrete solution. This method solves both the continuous and discrete formulations of the problem, and therefore has applications in learning, inference, and reconstruction. In our experiments, we illustrate the benefits of our method on two image segmentation tasks.

preprint2013arXiv

Statistical estimation for optimization problems on graphs

Large graphs abound in machine learning, data mining, and several related areas. A useful step towards analyzing such graphs is that of obtaining certain summary statistics - e.g., or the expected length of a shortest path between two nodes, or the expected weight of a minimum spanning tree of the graph, etc. These statistics provide insight into the structure of a graph, and they can help predict global properties of a graph. Motivated thus, we propose to study statistical properties of structured subgraphs (of a given graph), in particular, to estimate the expected objective function value of a combinatorial optimization problem over these subgraphs. The general task is very difficult, if not unsolvable; so for concreteness we describe a more specific statistical estimation problem based on spanning trees. We hope that our position paper encourages others to also study other types of graphical structures for which one can prove nontrivial statistical estimates.

preprint2012arXiv

Explicit eigenvalues of certain scaled trigonometric matrices

In a very recent paper "\emph{On eigenvalues and equivalent transformation of trigonometric matrices}" (D. Zhang, Z. Lin, and Y. Liu, LAA 436, 71--78 (2012)), the authors motivated and discussed a trigonometric matrix that arises in the design of finite impulse response (FIR) digital filters. The eigenvalues of this matrix shed light on the FIR filter design, so obtaining them in closed form was investigated. Zhang \emph{et al.}\ proved that their matrix had rank-4 and they conjectured closed form expressions for its eigenvalues, leaving a rigorous proof as an open problem. This paper studies trigonometric matrices significantly more general than theirs, deduces their rank, and derives closed-forms for their eigenvalues. As a corollary, it yields a short proof of the conjectures in the aforementioned paper.

preprint2012arXiv

Fast projections onto mixed-norm balls with applications

Joint sparsity offers powerful structural cues for feature selection, especially for variables that are expected to demonstrate a "grouped" behavior. Such behavior is commonly modeled via group-lasso, multitask lasso, and related methods where feature selection is effected via mixed-norms. Several mixed-norm based sparse models have received substantial attention, and for some cases efficient algorithms are also available. Surprisingly, several constrained sparse models seem to be lacking scalable algorithms. We address this deficiency by presenting batch and online (stochastic-gradient) optimization methods, both of which rely on efficient projections onto mixed-norm balls. We illustrate our methods by applying them to the multitask lasso. We conclude by mentioning some open problems.

preprint2012arXiv

Nonconvex proximal splitting: batch and incremental algorithms

Within the unmanageably large class of nonconvex optimization, we consider the rich subclass of nonsmooth problems that have composite objectives---this already includes the extensively studied convex, composite objective problems as a special case. For this subclass, we introduce a powerful, new framework that permits asymptotically non-vanishing perturbations. In particular, we develop perturbation-based batch and incremental (online like) nonconvex proximal splitting algorithms. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such perturbation-based nonconvex splitting algorithms are being proposed and analyzed. While the main contribution of the paper is the theoretical framework, we complement our results by presenting some empirical results on matrix factorization.

preprint2012arXiv

The Multivariate Watson Distribution: Maximum-Likelihood Estimation and other Aspects

This paper studies fundamental aspects of modelling data using multivariate Watson distributions. Although these distributions are natural for modelling axially symmetric data (i.e., unit vectors where $\pm \x$ are equivalent), for high-dimensions using them can be difficult. Why so? Largely because for Watson distributions even basic tasks such as maximum-likelihood are numerically challenging. To tackle the numerical difficulties some approximations have been derived---but these are either grossly inaccurate in high-dimensions (\emph{Directional Statistics}, Mardia & Jupp. 2000) or when reasonably accurate (\emph{J. Machine Learning Research, W. & C.P., v2}, Bijral \emph{et al.}, 2007, pp. 35--42), they lack theoretical justification. We derive new approximations to the maximum-likelihood estimates; our approximations are theoretically well-defined, numerically accurate, and easy to compute. We build on our parameter estimation and discuss mixture-modelling with Watson distributions; here we uncover a hitherto unknown connection to the "diametrical clustering" algorithm of Dhillon \emph{et al.} (\emph{Bioinformatics}, 19(13), 2003, pp. 1612--1619).

preprint2011arXiv

Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation via an Adaptive Gradient-Based Method

We study the problem of estimating from data, a sparse approximation to the inverse covariance matrix. Estimating a sparsity constrained inverse covariance matrix is a key component in Gaussian graphical model learning, but one that is numerically very challenging. We address this challenge by developing a new adaptive gradient-based method that carefully combines gradient information with an adaptive step-scaling strategy, which results in a scalable, highly competitive method. Our algorithm, like its predecessors, maximizes an $\ell_1$-norm penalized log-likelihood and has the same per iteration arithmetic complexity as the best methods in its class. Our experiments reveal that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art competitors, often significantly so, for large problems.