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arXiv research

A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.

168,657 papers · 148 categories

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64128191255 · Jun 202019922001200920172026
48 results for continuous relaxation

A simple continuous relaxation for argsort improves performance and is easy to implement.

problem Discrete nature of argsort operator makes it unsuitable for gradient-based learning.
method Proposed a continuous relaxation for argsort operator that is simple, fast, and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
result The proposed relaxation achieves state-of-the-art performance and is faster than competing approaches.

This work proposes a method to integrate algorithms into neural networks using continuous relaxation.

problem Training neural networks with new forms of supervision like ordering constraints.
method Relaxing discrete conditions in control structures like conditional statements, loops, and indexing to make them differentiable.
result The proposed method can keep up with relaxations designed for specific tasks, showing general applicability.

Spectral Clustering as a relaxation of the normalized/ratio cut has become one of the standard graph-based clustering methods. Existing methods for the computation of multiple clusters, corresponding to a balanced kk-cut of the graph, are either based on greedy techniques or heuristics which have weak connection to th…

2015-05-24abs ↗pdf ↗

In this paper, we study a nonconvex continuous relaxation of MAP inference in discrete Markov random fields (MRFs). We show that for arbitrary MRFs, this relaxation is tight, and a discrete stationary point of it can be easily reached by a simple block coordinate descent algorithm. In addition, we study the resolution …

2018-02-21abs ↗pdf ↗

CRA improves UL-based CO solvers by dynamically smoothing and enforcing discreteness.

problem Local optima and artificial rounding issues in UL-based CO solvers.
method Continuous Relaxation Annealing (CRA) strategy that dynamically shifts from continuous to discrete solutions.
result Significantly enhances UL-based CO solver performance and eliminates artificial rounding.

Enhances neural architecture search efficiency and prevents performance collapse.

problem Improving memory efficiency and preventing performance collapse in neural architecture search.
method Employing continuous relaxation strategy and gradient-based optimization for over-parameterized BCNN construction, introducing Confident Learning Rate and partial channel connections.
result NAS-v2 delivers state-of-the-art search efficiency on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet.

A novel method relaxes binary constraints to non-negative spheres for multi-matching and clustering.

problem Optimization problems over binary matrices with injectivity constraints.
method Non-negative spherical relaxation followed by conditional power iteration.
result Automatic adjustment of the continuous parameter related to universe size.

Sorting input objects is an important step in many machine learning pipelines. However, the sorting operator is non-differentiable with respect to its inputs, which prohibits end-to-end gradient-based optimization. In this work, we propose NeuralSort, a general-purpose continuous relaxation of the output of the sorting…

2019-03-21abs ↗pdf ↗

A new method for hierarchical clustering using continuous embeddings and optimization.

problem Hierarchical clustering with provable quality guarantees.
method Continuous relaxation of discrete optimization problem using hyperbolic embeddings and decoding.
result Continuous relaxation yields a discrete tree with (1 + epsilon)-factor approximation for optimal tree.

Boltzmann machines are powerful distributions that have been shown to be an effective prior over binary latent variables in variational autoencoders (VAEs). However, previous methods for training discrete VAEs have used the evidence lower bound and not the tighter importance-weighted bound. We propose two approaches fo…

2018-05-18abs ↗pdf ↗

This work optimizes RL algorithms using entropy regularisation for continuous-time LQ problems.

problem Designing RL algorithms to balance exploration and exploitation in noisy environments.
method Entropy regularisation in two formulations: exploratory control and proximal policy update.
result Regret of O(N)\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{N}) for both learning algorithms over NN episodes.

New gradient estimators for discrete variables improve model training.

problem Training models with discrete latent variables is challenging due to high gradient variance.
method Introduced novel gradient estimators based on importance sampling and statistical couplings, extending to categorical variables.
result Proposed gradient estimators outperform previous methods in systematic experiments.

CMDNet simplifies MAP detection for large systems with probabilistic relaxation.

problem High complexity of MAP detection in large systems.
method Probabilistic Continuous relaxation of discrete variables, iterative CMD algorithm, CMDNet with online optimization.
result CMDNet achieves a promising accuracy-complexity trade-off in MIMO systems.

In many applications we seek to maximize an expectation with respect to a distribution over discrete variables. Estimating gradients of such objectives with respect to the distribution parameters is a challenging problem. We analyze existing solutions including finite-difference (FD) estimators and continuous relaxatio…

2018-09-29abs ↗pdf ↗

We present a framework for learning disentangled and interpretable jointly continuous and discrete representations in an unsupervised manner. By augmenting the continuous latent distribution of variational autoencoders with a relaxed discrete distribution and controlling the amount of information encoded in each latent…

2018-03-31abs ↗pdf ↗

New algorithms improve neural architecture search with faster convergence.

problem Improving efficiency and accuracy of neural architecture search.
method Geometry-aware gradient algorithms to optimize continuous relaxation of discrete search spaces.
result Exceeds state-of-the-art results on CIFAR and ImageNet benchmarks.

A generalization of the Flow-box Theorem is given. The assumption of continuous differentiability of the vector field is relaxed to a local Lipschitz condition. The theorem holds in any Banach space.

2003-05-14abs ↗pdf ↗

This paper proposes exact and approximation algorithms for Sparse PCA, improving interpretability and scalability.

problem Selecting a prespecified-size principal submatrix from a covariance matrix to maximize its largest eigenvalue.
method Proposes two exact mixed-integer SDPs and a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) for SPCA, analyzes theoretical optimality gaps, and develops approximation algorithms.
result The proposed algorithms achieve strong theoretical optimality and effective scalability, with continuous relaxations close to optimality and MILP solving small to medium-size instances.

Signal processing is rich in inherently continuous and often nonlinear applications, such as spectral estimation, optical imaging, and super-resolution microscopy, in which sparsity plays a key role in obtaining state-of-the-art results. Coping with the infinite dimensionality and non-convexity of these problems typica…

2018-11-01abs ↗pdf ↗

Discrete random variables are natural components of probabilistic clustering models. A number of VAE variants with discrete latent variables have been developed. Training such methods requires marginalizing over the discrete latent variables, causing training time complexity to be linear in the number clusters. By appl…

2019-09-18abs ↗pdf ↗

Neural network quantization has become an important research area due to its great impact on deployment of large models on resource constrained devices. In order to train networks that can be effectively discretized without loss of performance, we introduce a differentiable quantization procedure. Differentiability can…

2018-10-03abs ↗pdf ↗

It is well known that the minimal superhedging price of a contingent claim is too high for practical use. In a continuous-time model uncertainty framework, we consider a relaxed hedging criterion based on acceptable shortfall risks. Combining existing aggregation and convex dual representation theorems, we derive duali…

2018-12-28abs ↗pdf ↗

This text explores strategies for learning discrete latent structures in neural networks.

problem Learning discrete latent structures in neural networks is challenging.
method Continuous relaxation, surrogate gradients, and probabilistic estimation.
result Many latent structure learning strategies use the same fundamental building blocks but apply them differently.

Federated learning approach for binary matrix factorization.

problem Efficiently factorizing binary data distributed across stakeholders while maintaining privacy.
method Proximal optimization for federated learning of relaxed binary matrix factorization.
result Federated algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods in quality and efficacy.

Graph matching---aligning a pair of graphs to minimize their edge disagreements---has received wide-spread attention from both theoretical and applied communities over the past several decades, including combinatorics, computer vision, and connectomics. Its attention can be partially attributed to its computational dif…

2014-05-13abs ↗pdf ↗

In a financial market with a continuous price process and proportional transaction costs we investigate the problem of utility maximization of terminal wealth. We give sufficient conditions for the existence of a shadow price process, i.e.~a least favorable frictionless market leading to the same optimal strategy and u…

2014-08-26abs ↗pdf ↗

Many machine learning tasks require sampling a subset of items from a collection based on a parameterized distribution. The Gumbel-softmax trick can be used to sample a single item, and allows for low-variance reparameterized gradients with respect to the parameters of the underlying distribution. However, stochastic o…

2019-01-29abs ↗pdf ↗

Study uses DRL with Lagrangian relaxation to solve temporal control tasks with STL constraints.

problem Optimal control problems with temporal logic constraints.
method Extended CMDP formulation, Lagrangian relaxation, two-phase constrained DRL algorithm.
result Demonstrated learning performance of the proposed algorithm through simulations.

Differentiable relaxation for inferring partial orders from noisy linear data.

problem Inference of partial orders from linear data with noisy observations.
method Introducing a differentiable relaxation to model noisy linear extensions, replacing discontinuous precedence and feasibility with smooth surrogates.
result Smooth posterior that preserves partial-order semantics, supports gradient-based inference, and converges to hard likelihood.

CO-BED optimizes experiments using Bayesian methods and information theory.

problem Optimizing experiments in a context-dependent manner.
method Formalizes contextual optimization with Bayesian experimental design, employing information-theoretic principles and black-box variational methods.
result CO-BED provides a general solution for contextual optimization problems.

CPRA efficiently finds diverse solutions in CO problems using UL and parallelization.

problem Finding optimal solutions often requires diverse outcomes in real-world applications.
method CPRA, an UL-based framework, discovers shared representations to generate diverse solutions.
result CPRA outperforms existing UL-based solvers in generating diverse solutions.

Graphs provide an efficient tool for object representation in various computer vision applications. Once graph-based representations are constructed, an important question is how to compare graphs. This problem is often formulated as a graph matching problem where one seeks a mapping between vertices of two graphs whic…

2010-04-28abs ↗pdf ↗

New method grows deep networks efficiently by dynamically pruning and growing layers.

problem Training deep networks is computationally expensive and inefficient.
method Structured continuous sparsification starting from a small seed architecture.
result 49.7% inference FLOPs and 47.4% training FLOPs savings with 75.2% top-1 accuracy.

New conic quadratic formulations improve outlier detection in regression models.

problem Detecting outliers in regression models with corrupted data.
method Deriving stronger second-order conic relaxations without big-M constraints.
result Proposed formulations are significantly faster than existing methods.

A new method for categorical variational inference using discrete normalizing flows.

problem Challenges in optimizing variational approximations for discrete latent variables.
method Differentiable reparameterization using a mixture of discrete normalizing flows.
result Improves optimization of evidence lower bound and reduces sensitivity to hyperparameters.

Paper relaxes stability and generalization assumptions for SGD.

problem Stability and generalization for SGD under restrictive assumptions.
method Introduces on-average model stability and develops novel bounds.
result First-ever-known fast bounds in low-noise setting using stability approach.