Gaussian process optimization is a successful class of algorithms(e.g. GP-UCB) to optimize a black-box function through sequential evaluations. However, for functions with continuous domains, Gaussian process optimization has to rely on either a fixed discretization of the space, or the solution of a non-convex optimization subproblem at each evaluation. The first approach can negatively affect performance, while the second approach puts requires a heavy computational burden. A third option, only recently theoretically studied, is to adaptively discretize the function domain. Even though this approach avoids the extra non-convex optimization costs, the overall computational complexity is still prohibitive. An algorithm such as GP-UCB has a runtime of $O(T^4)$, where $T$ is the number of iterations. In this paper, we introduce Ada-BKB (Adaptive Budgeted Kernelized Bandit), a no-regret Gaussian process optimization algorithm for functions on continuous domains, that provably runs in $O(T^2 d_\text{eff}^2)$, where $d_\text{eff}$ is the effective dimension of the explored space, and which is typically much smaller than $T$. We corroborate our theoretical findings with experiments on synthetic non-convex functions and on the real-world problem of hyper-parameter optimization, confirming the good practical performances of the proposed approach.
In this paper, we study a non-local approximation of the time-dependent (local) Eikonal equation with Dirichlet-type boundary conditions, where the kernel in the non-local problem is properly scaled. Based on the theory of viscosity solutions, we prove existence and uniqueness of the viscosity solutions of both the local and non-local problems, as well as regularity properties of these solutions in time and space. We then derive error bounds between the solution to the non-local problem and that of the local one, both in continuous-time and Backward Euler time discretization. We then turn to studying continuum limits of non-local problems defined on random weighted graphs with $n$ vertices. In particular, we establish that if the kernel scale parameter decreases at an appropriate rate as $n$ grows, then almost surely, the solution of the problem on graphs converges uniformly to the viscosity solution of the local problem as the time step vanishes and the number vertices $n$ grows large.
In this paper, we revisit the problem of Differentially Private Stochastic Convex Optimization (DP-SCO) and provide excess population risks for some special classes of functions that are faster than the previous results of general convex and strongly convex functions. In the first part of the paper, we study the case where the population risk function satisfies the Tysbakov Noise Condition (TNC) with some parameter $\theta>1$. Specifically, we first show that under some mild assumptions on the loss functions, there is an algorithm whose output could achieve an upper bound of $\tilde{O}((\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}+\frac{\sqrt{d\log \frac{1}{\delta}}}{n\epsilon})^\frac{\theta}{\theta-1})$ for $(\epsilon, \delta)$-DP when $\theta\geq 2$, here $n$ is the sample size and $d$ is the dimension of the space. Then we address the inefficiency issue, improve the upper bounds by $\text{Poly}(\log n)$ factors and extend to the case where $\theta\geq \bar{\theta}>1$ for some known $\bar{\theta}$. Next we show that the excess population risk of population functions satisfying TNC with parameter $\theta\geq 2$ is always lower bounded by $\Omega((\frac{d}{n\epsilon})^\frac{\theta}{\theta-1}) $ and $\Omega((\frac{\sqrt{d\log \frac{1}{\delta}}}{n\epsilon})^\frac{\theta}{\theta-1})$ for $\epsilon$-DP and $(\epsilon, \delta)$-DP, respectively. In the second part, we focus on a special case where the population risk function is strongly convex. Unlike the previous studies, here we assume the loss function is {\em non-negative} and {\em the optimal value of population risk is sufficiently small}. With these additional assumptions, we propose a new method whose output could achieve an upper bound of $O(\frac{d\log\frac{1}{\delta}}{n^2\epsilon^2}+\frac{1}{n^{\tau}})$ for any $\tau\geq 1$ in $(\epsilon,\delta)$-DP model if the sample size $n$ is sufficiently large.
Zeroth-order optimization methods are developed to overcome the practical hurdle of having knowledge of explicit derivatives. Instead, these schemes work with merely access to noisy functions evaluations. The predominant approach is to mimic first-order methods by means of some gradient estimator. The theoretical limitations are well-understood, yet, as most of these methods rely on finite-differencing for shrinking differences, numerical cancellation can be catastrophic. The numerical community developed an efficient method to overcome this by passing to the complex domain. This approach has been recently adopted by the optimization community and in this work we analyze the practically relevant setting of dealing with computational noise. To exemplify the possibilities we focus on the strongly-convex optimization setting and provide a variety of non-asymptotic results, corroborated by numerical experiments, and end with local non-convex optimization.
We introduce weak barycenters of a family of probability distributions, based on the recently developed notion of optimal weak transport of mass by Gozlanet al. (2017) and Backhoff-Veraguas et al. (2020). We provide a theoretical analysis of this object and discuss its interpretation in the light of convex ordering between probability measures. In particular, we show that, rather than averaging the input distributions in a geometric way (as the Wasserstein barycenter based on classic optimal transport does) weak barycenters extract common geometric information shared by all the input distributions, encoded as a latent random variable that underlies all of them. We also provide an iterative algorithm to compute a weak barycenter for a finite family of input distributions, and a stochastic algorithm that computes them for arbitrary populations of laws. The latter approach is particularly well suited for the streaming setting, i.e., when distributions are observed sequentially. The notion of weak barycenter and our approaches to compute it are illustrated on synthetic examples, validated on 2D real-world data and compared to standard Wasserstein barycenters.
In this paper, we propose a new trace finite element method for the {Laplace-Beltrami} eigenvalue problem. The method is proposed directly on a smooth manifold which is implicitly given by a level-set function and require high order numerical quadrature on the surface. A comprehensive analysis for the method is provided. We show that the eigenvalues of the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator coincide with only part of the eigenvalues of an embedded problem, which further corresponds to the finite eigenvalues for a singular generalized algebraic eigenvalue problem. The finite eigenvalues can be efficiently solved by a rank-completing perturbation algorithm in {\it Hochstenbach et al. SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl., 2019} \cite{hochstenbach2019solving}. We prove the method has optimal convergence rate. Numerical experiments verify the theoretical analysis and show that the geometric consistency can improve the numerical accuracy significantly.
We construct a space-time parallel method for solving parabolic partial differential equations by coupling the Parareal algorithm in time with overlapping domain decomposition in space. The goal is to obtain a discretization consisting of "local" problems that can be solved on parallel computers efficiently. However, this introduces significant sources of error that must be evaluated. Reformulating the original Parareal algorithm as a variational method and implementing a finite element discretization in space enables an adjoint-based a posteriori error analysis to be performed. Through an appropriate choice of adjoint problems and residuals the error analysis distinguishes between errors arising due to the temporal and spatial discretizations, as well as between the errors arising due to incomplete Parareal iterations and incomplete iterations of the domain decomposition solver. We first develop an error analysis for the Parareal method applied to parabolic partial differential equations, and then refine this analysis to the case where the associated spatial problems are solved using overlapping domain decomposition. These constitute our Time Parallel Algorithm (TPA) and Space-Time Parallel Algorithm (STPA) respectively. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy of the estimator for both algorithms and the iterations between distinct components of the error.
Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is a widely used tool for machine learning in distributed settings, where a machine learning model is trained over distributed data sources through an interactive process of local computation and message passing. Such an iterative process could cause privacy concerns of data owners. The goal of this paper is to provide differential privacy for ADMM-based distributed machine learning. Prior approaches on differentially private ADMM exhibit low utility under high privacy guarantee and often assume the objective functions of the learning problems to be smooth and strongly convex. To address these concerns, we propose a novel differentially private ADMM-based distributed learning algorithm called DP-ADMM, which combines an approximate augmented Lagrangian function with time-varying Gaussian noise addition in the iterative process to achieve higher utility for general objective functions under the same differential privacy guarantee. We also apply the moments accountant method to bound the end-to-end privacy loss. The theoretical analysis shows that DP-ADMM can be applied to a wider class of distributed learning problems, is provably convergent, and offers an explicit utility-privacy tradeoff. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to provide explicit convergence and utility properties for differentially private ADMM-based distributed learning algorithms. The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach can achieve good convergence and model accuracy under high end-to-end differential privacy guarantee.
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a highly popular model-free reinforcement learning (RL) approach. However, in continuous state and actions spaces and a Gaussian policy -- common in computer animation and robotics -- PPO is prone to getting stuck in local optima. In this paper, we observe a tendency of PPO to prematurely shrink the exploration variance, which naturally leads to slow progress. Motivated by this, we borrow ideas from CMA-ES, a black-box optimization method designed for intelligent adaptive Gaussian exploration, to derive PPO-CMA, a novel proximal policy optimization approach that can expand the exploration variance on objective function slopes and shrink the variance when close to the optimum. This is implemented by using separate neural networks for policy mean and variance and training the mean and variance in separate passes. Our experiments demonstrate a clear improvement over vanilla PPO in many difficult OpenAI Gym MuJoCo tasks.
In this work, we consider the distributed optimization of non-smooth convex functions using a network of computing units. We investigate this problem under two regularity assumptions: (1) the Lipschitz continuity of the global objective function, and (2) the Lipschitz continuity of local individual functions. Under the local regularity assumption, we provide the first optimal first-order decentralized algorithm called multi-step primal-dual (MSPD) and its corresponding optimal convergence rate. A notable aspect of this result is that, for non-smooth functions, while the dominant term of the error is in $O(1/\sqrt{t})$, the structure of the communication network only impacts a second-order term in $O(1/t)$, where $t$ is time. In other words, the error due to limits in communication resources decreases at a fast rate even in the case of non-strongly-convex objective functions. Under the global regularity assumption, we provide a simple yet efficient algorithm called distributed randomized smoothing (DRS) based on a local smoothing of the objective function, and show that DRS is within a $d^{1/4}$ multiplicative factor of the optimal convergence rate, where $d$ is the underlying dimension.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.