Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is a popular class of algorithms for scalable Bayesian inference. However, these algorithms include hyperparameters such as step size or batch size that influence the accuracy of estimators based on the obtained posterior samples. As a result, these hyperparameters must be tuned by the practitioner and currently no principled and automated way to tune them exists. Standard MCMC tuning methods based on acceptance rates cannot be used for SGMCMC, thus requiring alternative tools and diagnostics. We propose a novel bandit-based algorithm that tunes the SGMCMC hyperparameters by minimizing the Stein discrepancy between the true posterior and its Monte Carlo approximation. We provide theoretical results supporting this approach and assess various Stein-based discrepancies. We support our results with experiments on both simulated and real datasets, and find that this method is practical for a wide range of applications.
Stochastic epidemic models provide an interpretable probabilistic description of the spread of a disease through a population. Yet, fitting these models when the epidemic process is only partially observed is a notoriously difficult task due to the intractability of the likelihood for many classical models. To remedy this issue, this article introduces a novel data-augmented MCMC algorithm for fast and exact Bayesian inference for the stochastic SIR model given discretely observed infection incidence counts. In a Metropolis-Hastings step, new event times of the latent data are jointly proposed from a surrogate process that closely resembles the SIR, and from which we can efficiently generate epidemics compatible with the observed data. The proposed DA-MCMC algorithm is fast and, since the latent data are generated from a faithful approximation of the target model, a large portion thereof can be updated per iteration without prohibitively lowering the acceptance rate. We find that the method explores the high-dimensional latent space efficiently and scales to outbreaks with hundreds of thousands of individuals, and we show that the Markov chain underlying the algorithm is uniformly ergodic. We validate its performance via thorough simulation experiments and a case study on the 2013-2015 Ebola outbreak in Western Africa.
Federated learning (FL), as an emerging edge artificial intelligence paradigm, enables many edge devices to collaboratively train a global model without sharing their private data. To enhance the training efficiency of FL, various algorithms have been proposed, ranging from first-order to second-order methods. However, these algorithms cannot be applied in scenarios where the gradient information is not available, e.g., federated black-box attack and federated hyperparameter tuning. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a derivative-free federated zeroth-order optimization (FedZO) algorithm featured by performing multiple local updates based on stochastic gradient estimators in each communication round and enabling partial device participation. Under the non-convex setting, we derive the convergence performance of the FedZO algorithm and characterize the impact of the numbers of local iterates and participating edge devices on the convergence. To enable communication-efficient FedZO over wireless networks, we further propose an over-the-air computation (AirComp) assisted FedZO algorithm. With an appropriate transceiver design, we show that the convergence of AirComp-assisted FedZO can still be preserved under certain signal-to-noise ratio conditions. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the FedZO algorithm and validate the theoretical observations.
We introduce Stochastic Asymptotical Regularization (SAR) methods for the uncertainty quantification of the stable approximate solution of ill-posed linear-operator equations, which are deterministic models for numerous inverse problems in science and engineering. We prove the regularizing properties of SAR with regard to mean-square convergence. We also show that SAR is an optimal-order regularization method for linear ill-posed problems provided that the terminating time of SAR is chosen according to the smoothness of the solution. This result is proven for both a priori and a posteriori stopping rules under general range-type source conditions. Furthermore, some converse results of SAR are verified. Two iterative schemes are developed for the numerical realization of SAR, and the convergence analyses of these two numerical schemes are also provided. A toy example and a real-world problem of biosensor tomography are studied to show the accuracy and the advantages of SAR: compared with the conventional deterministic regularization approaches for deterministic inverse problems, SAR can provide the uncertainty quantification of the quantity of interest, which can in turn be used to reveal and explicate the hidden information about real-world problems, usually obscured by the incomplete mathematical modeling and the ascendence of complex-structured noise.
We derive a posteriori error estimates for a fully discrete finite element approximation of the stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equation. The a posteriori bound is obtained by a splitting of the equation into a linear stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) and a nonlinear random partial differential equation (RPDE). The resulting estimate is robust with respect to the interfacial width parameter and is computable since it involves the discrete principal eigenvalue of a linearized (stochastic) Cahn-Hilliard operator. Furthermore, the estimate is robust with respect to topological changes as well as the intensity of the stochastic noise. We provide numerical simulations to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed adaptive algorithm.
Optimal transport distances have found many applications in machine learning for their capacity to compare non-parametric probability distributions. Yet their algorithmic complexity generally prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. Among the possible strategies to alleviate this issue, practitioners can rely on computing estimates of these distances over subsets of data, {\em i.e.} minibatches. While computationally appealing, we highlight in this paper some limits of this strategy, arguing it can lead to undesirable smoothing effects. As an alternative, we suggest that the same minibatch strategy coupled with unbalanced optimal transport can yield more robust behavior. We discuss the associated theoretical properties, such as unbiased estimators, existence of gradients and concentration bounds. Our experimental study shows that in challenging problems associated to domain adaptation, the use of unbalanced optimal transport leads to significantly better results, competing with or surpassing recent baselines.
Current training objectives of existing person Re-IDentification (ReID) models only ensure that the loss of the model decreases on selected training batch, with no regards to the performance on samples outside the batch. It will inevitably cause the model to over-fit the data in the dominant position (e.g., head data in imbalanced class, easy samples or noisy samples). %We call the sample that updates the model towards generalizing on more data a generalizable sample. The latest resampling methods address the issue by designing specific criterion to select specific samples that trains the model generalize more on certain type of data (e.g., hard samples, tail data), which is not adaptive to the inconsistent real world ReID data distributions. Therefore, instead of simply presuming on what samples are generalizable, this paper proposes a one-for-more training objective that directly takes the generalization ability of selected samples as a loss function and learn a sampler to automatically select generalizable samples. More importantly, our proposed one-for-more based sampler can be seamlessly integrated into the ReID training framework which is able to simultaneously train ReID models and the sampler in an end-to-end fashion. The experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the ReID model training and boost the performance of ReID models.
Sampling methods (e.g., node-wise, layer-wise, or subgraph) has become an indispensable strategy to speed up training large-scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing sampling methods are mostly based on the graph structural information and ignore the dynamicity of optimization, which leads to high variance in estimating the stochastic gradients. The high variance issue can be very pronounced in extremely large graphs, where it results in slow convergence and poor generalization. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the variance of sampling methods and show that, due to the composite structure of empirical risk, the variance of any sampling method can be decomposed into \textit{embedding approximation variance} in the forward stage and \textit{stochastic gradient variance} in the backward stage that necessities mitigating both types of variance to obtain faster convergence rate. We propose a decoupled variance reduction strategy that employs (approximate) gradient information to adaptively sample nodes with minimal variance, and explicitly reduces the variance introduced by embedding approximation. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed method, even with smaller mini-batch sizes, enjoys a faster convergence rate and entails a better generalization compared to the existing methods.
Training large deep neural networks on massive datasets is computationally very challenging. There has been recent surge in interest in using large batch stochastic optimization methods to tackle this issue. The most prominent algorithm in this line of research is LARS, which by employing layerwise adaptive learning rates trains ResNet on ImageNet in a few minutes. However, LARS performs poorly for attention models like BERT, indicating that its performance gains are not consistent across tasks. In this paper, we first study a principled layerwise adaptation strategy to accelerate training of deep neural networks using large mini-batches. Using this strategy, we develop a new layerwise adaptive large batch optimization technique called LAMB; we then provide convergence analysis of LAMB as well as LARS, showing convergence to a stationary point in general nonconvex settings. Our empirical results demonstrate the superior performance of LAMB across various tasks such as BERT and ResNet-50 training with very little hyperparameter tuning. In particular, for BERT training, our optimizer enables use of very large batch sizes of 32868 without any degradation of performance. By increasing the batch size to the memory limit of a TPUv3 Pod, BERT training time can be reduced from 3 days to just 76 minutes (Table 1).
We present a generalization of the Cauchy/Lorentzian, Geman-McClure, Welsch/Leclerc, generalized Charbonnier, Charbonnier/pseudo-Huber/L1-L2, and L2 loss functions. By introducing robustness as a continous parameter, our loss function allows algorithms built around robust loss minimization to be generalized, which improves performance on basic vision tasks such as registration and clustering. Interpreting our loss as the negative log of a univariate density yields a general probability distribution that includes normal and Cauchy distributions as special cases. This probabilistic interpretation enables the training of neural networks in which the robustness of the loss automatically adapts itself during training, which improves performance on learning-based tasks such as generative image synthesis and unsupervised monocular depth estimation, without requiring any manual parameter tuning.
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) has become a popular method for scalable Bayesian inference. These methods are based on sampling a discrete-time approximation to a continuous time process, such as the Langevin diffusion. When applied to distributions defined on a constrained space, such as the simplex, the time-discretisation error can dominate when we are near the boundary of the space. We demonstrate that while current SGMCMC methods for the simplex perform well in certain cases, they struggle with sparse simplex spaces; when many of the components are close to zero. However, most popular large-scale applications of Bayesian inference on simplex spaces, such as network or topic models, are sparse. We argue that this poor performance is due to the biases of SGMCMC caused by the discretization error. To get around this, we propose the stochastic CIR process, which removes all discretization error and we prove that samples from the stochastic CIR process are asymptotically unbiased. Use of the stochastic CIR process within a SGMCMC algorithm is shown to give substantially better performance for a topic model and a Dirichlet process mixture model than existing SGMCMC approaches.