arXiv Statistics ML

Riemannian Gradient Descent for Gaussian Mixture Models with unknown diagonal covariances

The paper studies the numerical solution of the Beurling‑LASSO (BLASSO) for estimating Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) with unknown numbers of components and unknown diagonal covariance matrices. It introduces a Conic Particle Gradient Descent (CPGD) algorithm that incorporates Riemannian gradient descent to respect the Fisher‑Rao geometry of Gaussian distributions. The authors provide theoretical convergence guarantees, including exponential local convergence under a non‑degeneracy condition related to component separation, and demonstrate through numerical experiments that CPGD is more robust to overspecification of components than the EM algorithm.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Global Convergence of Gradient EM for Over-Parameterized Gaussian Mixtures

arXiv:2506. 06584v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning, with the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm and its popular variant gradient EM being arguably the most widely used algorithms in practice.

By Mo Zhou, Weihang Xu, Maryam Fazel, Simon S. Du
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Sublinear Variational Optimization of Gaussian Mixture Models with Millions to Billions of Parameters

The paper introduces a highly efficient variational approximation for Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) with arbitrary covariances, integrated with mixtures of factor analyzers. This method reduces the per‑iteration runtime from ≠O(NCD^2) to a complexity that scales linearly with dimensionality D and sublinearly with the product NC. Experiments demonstrate sublinear scaling across the entire optimization, order‑of‑magnitude speed‑ups on large benchmarks, training of GMMs with over 10 billion parameters in under nine hours on a single CPU, and competitive zero‑shot image denoising performance.

By Sebastian Salwig, Till Kahlke, Florian Hirschberger, Dennis Forster, J\"org L\"ucke
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Near-Optimal Nonconvex Matrix Completion

arXiv:2609. 17048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study nonconvex methods for matrix completion, the problem of recovering a low-rank matrix from a subset of its entries.

By Jian-Feng Cai, Xiliang Lu, Juntao You
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Variance Reduction for Non-Log-Concave Sampling with Applications to Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606. 16257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from high-dimensional, non-log-concave distributions with unnormalized densities is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when the exact gradient of the potential is unavailable and must be approximated via stochastic gradients that exhibit high variance under a fixed budget of gradient computations per iteration.

By M. Berk Sahin, Ahmet Ege Tanriverdi, Behzad Sharif, Abolfazl Hashemi