Stochastic gradient descent algorithm has been successfully applied on support vector machines (called PEGASOS) for many classification problems. In this paper, stochastic gradient descent algorithm is investigated to twin support vector machines for classification. Compared with PEGASOS, the proposed stochastic gradient twin support vector machines (SGTSVM) is insensitive on stochastic samplin...

We present and study a distributed optimization algorithm by employing a stochastic dual coordinate ascent method. Stochastic dual coordinate ascent methods enjoy strong theoretical guarantees and often have better performances than stochastic gradient descent methods in optimizing regularized loss minimization problems. It still lacks of efforts in studying them in a distributed framework. We ...

Stochastic gradient descent based algorithms are typically used as the general optimization tools for most deep learning models. A Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) is a probabilistic generative model that can be stacked to construct deep architectures. For RBM with Bernoulli inputs, non-Euclidean algorithm such as stochastic spectral descent (SSD) has been specifically designed to speed up th...

Reactive (memoryless) policies are sufficient in completely observable Markov decision processes (MDPs), but some kind of memory is usually necessary for optimal control of a partially observable MDP. Policies with finite memory can be represented as finite-state automata. In this paper, we extend Baird and Moore’s VAPS algorithm to the problem of learning general finite-state automata. Because...

Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) are widely used as building blocks for deep learning models. Learning typically proceeds by using stochastic gradient descent, and the gradients are estimated with sampling methods. However, the gradient estimation is a computational bottleneck, so better use of the gradients will speed up the descent algorithm. To this end, we first derive upper bounds on t...

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient descent, using Monte Carlo approximation for the gradients. This enables variational inference for arbitrary differentiable probabilistic models, and conseque...

This paper studies the performance of preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (PSGD), which can be regarded as an enhance stochastic Newton method with the ability to handle gradient noise and non-convexity at the same time. We have improved the implementation of PSGD, unrevealed its relationship to equilibrated stochastic gradient descent (ESGD) and feature normalization, and provided a sof...

Stochastic gradient descent remains popular in large-scale machine learning, on account of its very low computational cost and robustness to noise. However, gradient descent is only linearly efficient and not transformation invariant. Scaling by a local measure can substantially improve its performance. One natural choice of such a scale is the Hessian of the objective function: Were it availab...

Linear predictors are especially useful when the data is high-dimensional and sparse. One of the standard techniques used to train a linear predictor is the Averaged Stochastic Gradient Descent (ASGD) algorithm. We present an efficient implementation of ASGD that avoids dense vector operations. We also describe a translation invariant extension called Centered Averaged Stochastic Gradient Desce...