Simulation-based inference (SBI) is a method to perform inference on a variety of complex scientific models with challenging inference (inverse) problems. Bayesian Optimal Experimental Design (BOED) aims to efficiently use experimental resources to make better inferences. Various stochastic gradient-based BOED methods have been proposed as an alternative to Bayesian optimization and other experimental design heuristics to maximize information gain from an experiment. We demonstrate a link via mutual information bounds between SBI and stochastic gradient-based variational inference methods that permits BOED to be used in SBI applications as SBI-BOED. This link allows simultaneous optimization of experimental designs and optimization of amortized inference functions. We evaluate the pitfalls of naive design optimization using this method in a standard SBI task and demonstrate the utility of a well-chosen design distribution in BOED. We compare this approach on SBI-based models in real-world simulators in epidemiology and biology, showing notable improvements in inference.

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is a cornerstone of modern machine learning (ML), supported by advances in optimization theory that ensure efficient solutions with provable algorithmic convergence rates, which measure the speed at which optimization algorithms approach a solution, and statistical learning rates, which characterize how well the solution generalizes to unseen data. Privacy, memory, computational, and communications constraints increasingly necessitate data collection, processing, and storage across network-connected devices. In many applications, these networks operate in decentralized settings where a central server cannot be assumed, requiring decentralized ML algorithms that are both efficient and resilient. Decentralized learning, however, faces significant challenges, including an increased attack surface for adversarial interference during decentralized learning processes. This paper focuses on the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, which can cause models to deviate significantly from their intended ERM solutions. To address this challenge, we propose RESIST (Resilient dEcentralized learning using conSensus gradIent deScenT), an optimization algorithm designed to be robust against adversarially compromised communication links. RESIST achieves algorithmic and statistical convergence for strongly convex, Polyak-Lojasiewicz, and nonconvex ERM problems. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness and scalability of RESIST for real-world decentralized learning in adversarial environments.

Negative dependence is becoming a key driver in advancing learning capabilities beyond the limits of traditional independence. Recent developments have evidenced support towards negatively dependent systems as a learning paradigm in a broad range of fundamental machine learning challenges including optimization, sampling, dimensionality reduction and sparse signal recovery, often surpassing the performance of current methods based on statistical independence. The most popular negatively dependent model has been that of determinantal point processes (DPPs), which have their origins in quantum theory. However, other models, such as perturbed lattice models, strongly Rayleigh measures, zeros of random functions have gained salience in various learning applications. In this article, we review this burgeoning field of research, as it has developed over the past two decades or so. We also present new results on applications of DPPs to the parsimonious representation of neural networks. In the limited scope of the article, we mostly focus on aspects of this area to which the authors contributed over the recent years, including applications to Monte Carlo methods, coresets and stochastic gradient descent, stochastic networks, signal processing and connections to quantum computation. However, starting from basics of negative dependence for the uninitiated reader, extensive references are provided to a broad swath of related developments which could not be covered within our limited scope. While existing works and reviews generally focus on specific negatively dependent models (e.g. DPPs), a notable feature of this article is that it addresses negative dependence as a machine learning methodology as a whole. In this vein, it covers within its span an array of negatively dependent models and their applications well beyond DPPs, thereby putting forward a very general and rather unique perspective.

Modern adaptive optimization methods, such as Adam and its variants, have emerged as the most widely used tools in deep learning over recent years. These algorithms offer automatic mechanisms for dynamically adjusting the update step based on estimates of gradient statistics. Compared to traditional algorithms like Stochastic Gradient Descent, these adaptive methods are typically more robust to model scale and hyperparameter tuning. However, the gradient statistics employed by these methods often do not leverage sufficient gradient covariance information, leading to suboptimal updates in certain directions of the parameter space and potentially slower convergence. In this work, we keep track of such covariance statistics in the form of a structured preconditioner matrix. Unlike other works, our approach does not apply direct approximations to estimate this matrix. We instead implement an invertible transformation that maps the preconditioner matrix into a new space where it becomes approximately diagonal. This enables a diagonal approximation of the preconditioner matrix in the transformed space, offering several computational advantages. Empirical results show that our approach can substantially enhance the convergence speed of modern adaptive optimizers. Notably, for large language models like LLaMA, we can achieve a speedup of 2x compared to the baseline Adam. Additionally, our method can be integrated with memory-efficient optimizers like Adafactor to manage computational overhead.

Minimizing the inclusive Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is challenging since its gradient is defined as an integral over the posterior. Recently, multiple methods have been proposed to run SGD with biased gradient estimates obtained from a Markov chain. This paper provides the first non-asymptotic convergence analysis of these methods by establishing their mixing rate and gradient variance. To do this, we demonstrate that these methods-which we collectively refer to as Markov chain score ascent (MCSA) methods-can be cast as special cases of the Markov chain gradient descent framework. Furthermore, by leveraging this new understanding, we develop a novel MCSA scheme, parallel MCSA (pMCSA), that achieves a tighter bound on the gradient variance. We demonstrate that this improved theoretical result translates to superior empirical performance.

The task of reconstructing a matrix given a sample of observed entries is known as the matrix completion problem. It arises in a wide range of problems, including recommender systems, collaborative filtering, dimensionality reduction, image processing, quantum physics or multi-class classification to name a few. Most works have focused on recovering an unknown real-valued low-rank matrix from randomly sub-sampling its entries. Here, we investigate the case where the observations take a finite number of values, corresponding for examples to ratings in recommender systems or labels in multi-class classification. We also consider a general sampling scheme (not necessarily uniform) over the matrix entries. The performance of a nuclear-norm penalized estimator is analyzed theoretically. More precisely, we derive bounds for the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the true and estimated distributions. In practice, we have also proposed an efficient algorithm based on lifted coordinate gradient descent in order to tackle potentially high dimensional settings.

We improve a recent guarantee of Bach and Moulines on the linear convergence of SGD for smooth and strongly convex objectives, reducing a quadratic dependence on the strong convexity to a linear dependence. Furthermore, we show how reweighting the sampling distribution (i.e.

We provide a new understanding of the stochastic gradient bandit algorithm by showing that it converges to a globally optimal policy almost surely using \emph{any} constant learning rate. This result demonstrates that the stochastic gradient algorithm continues to balance exploration and exploitation appropriately even in scenarios where standard smoothness and noise control assumptions break down. The proofs are based on novel findings about action sampling rates and the relationship between cumulative progress and noise, and extend the current understanding of how simple stochastic gradient methods behave in bandit settings.

Conditional expectation E(Y | X) often fails This limitation has important implications for downstream to capture the complexity of multimodal conditional tasks, particularly in uncertainty quantification for image distributions L(Y | X). To address this, restoration models used in safety-critical domains such as we propose using n-point conditional quantizations--functional autonomous driving and biological imaging. Many existing mappings of X that are learnable approaches rely on per-pixel estimates such as variance via gradient descent--to approximate L(Y | heatmaps (Kendall and Gal, 2017) or confidence intervals X). This approach adapts Competitive Learning (Angelopoulos et al., 2022) to visualize uncertainty. Vector Quantization (CLVQ), tailored for conditional While these methods provide valuable insights, they can distributions. It goes beyond single-valued struggle to represent structured uncertainty, overlooking predictions by providing multiple representative spatial correlations between neighboring pixels.

Training large language models (LLMs) typically relies on adaptive optimizers like Adam (Kingma & Ba, 2015) which store additional state information to accelerate convergence but incur significant memory overhead. Recent efforts, such as SWAN (Ma et al., 2024) address this by eliminating the need for optimizer states while achieving performance comparable to Adam via a multi-step preprocessing procedure applied to instantaneous gradients. Motivated by the success of SWAN, we introduce a novel framework for designing stateless optimizers that normalizes stochastic gradients according to multiple norms. To achieve this, we propose a simple alternating scheme to enforce the normalization of gradients w.r.t these norms. We show that our procedure can produce, up to an arbitrary precision, a fixed-point of the problem, and that SWAN is a particular instance of our approach with carefully chosen norms, providing a deeper understanding of its design. However, SWAN's computationally expensive whitening/orthogonalization step limit its practicality for large LMs. Using our principled perspective, we develop of a more efficient, scalable, and practical stateless optimizer. Our algorithm relaxes the properties of SWAN, significantly reducing its computational cost while retaining its memory efficiency, making it applicable to training large-scale models. Experiments on pre-training LLaMA models with up to 1 billion parameters demonstrate a 3X speedup over Adam with significantly reduced memory requirements, outperforming other memory-efficient baselines.