arXiv subjects

Gersende Fort

Publications and source records attributed to Gersende Fort.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Revisiting Incremental Stochastic Majorization-Minimization Algorithms with Applications to Mixture of Experts

Processing high-volume, streaming data is increasingly common in modern statistics and machine learning, where batch-mode algorithms are often impractical because they require repeated passes over the full dataset. This has motivated incremental stochastic estimation methods, including the incremental stochastic Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm formulated via stochastic approximation. In this work, we revisit and analyze an incremental stochastic variant of the Majorization-Minimization (MM) algorithm, which generalizes incremental stochastic EM as a special case. Our approach relaxes key EM requirements, such as explicit latent-variable representations, enabling broader applicability and greater algorithmic flexibility. We establish theoretical guarantees for the incremental stochastic MM algorithm, proving consistency in the sense that the iterates converge to a stationary point characterized by a vanishing gradient of the objective. We demonstrate these advantages on a softmax-gated mixture of experts (MoE) regression problem, for which no stochastic EM algorithm is available. Empirically, our method consistently outperforms widely used stochastic optimizers, including stochastic gradient descent, root mean square propagation, adaptive moment estimation, and second-order clipped stochastic optimization. These results support the development of new incremental stochastic algorithms, given the central role of softmax-gated MoE architectures in contemporary deep neural networks for heterogeneous data modeling. Beyond synthetic experiments, we also validate practical effectiveness on two real-world datasets, including a bioinformatics study of dent maize genotypes under drought stress that integrates high-dimensional proteomics with ecophysiological traits, where incremental stochastic MM yields stable gains in predictive performance.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Federated Majorize-Minimization: Beyond Parameter Aggregation

This paper proposes a unified approach for designing stochastic optimization algorithms that robustly scale to the federated learning setting. Our work studies a class of Majorize-Minimization (MM) problems, which possesses a linearly parameterized family of majorizing surrogate functions. This framework encompasses (proximal) gradient-based algorithms for (regularized) smooth objectives, the Expectation Maximization algorithm, and many problems seen as variational surrogate MM. We show that our framework motivates a unifying algorithm called Stochastic Approximation Stochastic Surrogate MM (\SSMM), which includes previous stochastic MM procedures as special instances. We then extend \SSMM\ to the federated setting, while taking into consideration common bottlenecks such as data heterogeneity, partial participation, and communication constraints; this yields \QSMM. The originality of \QSMM\ is to learn locally and then aggregate information characterizing the \textit{surrogate majorizing function}, contrary to classical algorithms which learn and aggregate the \textit{original parameter}. Finally, to showcase the flexibility of this methodology beyond our theoretical setting, we use it to design an algorithm for computing optimal transport maps in the federated setting.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Stochastic Approximation Beyond Gradient for Signal Processing and Machine Learning

Stochastic Approximation (SA) is a classical algorithm that has had since the early days a huge impact on signal processing, and nowadays on machine learning, due to the necessity to deal with a large amount of data observed with uncertainties. An exemplar special case of SA pertains to the popular stochastic (sub)gradient algorithm which is the working horse behind many important applications. A lesser-known fact is that the SA scheme also extends to non-stochastic-gradient algorithms such as compressed stochastic gradient, stochastic expectation-maximization, and a number of reinforcement learning algorithms. The aim of this article is to overview and introduce the non-stochastic-gradient perspectives of SA to the signal processing and machine learning audiences through presenting a design guideline of SA algorithms backed by theories. Our central theme is to propose a general framework that unifies existing theories of SA, including its non-asymptotic and asymptotic convergence results, and demonstrate their applications on popular non-stochastic-gradient algorithms. We build our analysis framework based on classes of Lyapunov functions that satisfy a variety of mild conditions. We draw connections between non-stochastic-gradient algorithms and scenarios when the Lyapunov function is smooth, convex, or strongly convex. Using the said framework, we illustrate the convergence properties of the non-stochastic-gradient algorithms using concrete examples. Extensions to the emerging variance reduction techniques for improved sample complexity will also be discussed.

math.OC↗

arXiv2023

Stochastic Variable Metric Proximal Gradient with variance reduction for non-convex composite optimization

This paper introduces a novel algorithm, the Perturbed Proximal Preconditioned SPIDER algorithm (3P-SPIDER), designed to solve finite sum non-convex composite optimization. It is a stochastic Variable Metric Forward-Backward algorithm, which allows approximate preconditioned forward operator and uses a variable metric proximity operator as the backward operator; it also proposes a mini-batch strategy with variance reduction to address the finite sum setting. We show that 3P-SPIDER extends some Stochastic preconditioned Gradient Descent-based algorithms and some Incremental Expectation Maximization algorithms to composite optimization and to the case the forward operator can not be computed in closed form. We also provide an explicit control of convergence in expectation of 3P-SPIDER, and study its complexity in order to satisfy the epsilon-approximate stationary condition. Our results are the first to combine the composite non-convex optimization setting, a variance reduction technique to tackle the finite sum setting by using a minibatch strategy and, to allow deterministic or random approximations of the preconditioned forward operator. Finally, through an application to inference in a logistic regression model with random effects, we numerically compare 3P-SPIDER to other stochastic forward-backward algorithms and discuss the role of some design parameters of 3P-SPIDER.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Covid19 Reproduction Number: Credibility Intervals by Blockwise Proximal Monte Carlo Samplers

Monitoring the Covid19 pandemic constitutes a critical societal stake that received considerable research efforts. The intensity of the pandemic on a given territory is efficiently measured by the reproduction number, quantifying the rate of growth of daily new infections. Recently, estimates for the time evolution of the reproduction number were produced using an inverse problem formulation with a nonsmooth functional minimization. While it was designed to be robust to the limited quality of the Covid19 data (outliers, missing counts), the procedure lacks the ability to output credibility interval based estimates. This remains a severe limitation for practical use in actual pandemic monitoring by epidemiologists that the present work aims to overcome by use of Monte Carlo sampling. After interpretation of the nonsmooth functional into a Bayesian framework, several sampling schemes are tailored to adjust the nonsmooth nature of the resulting posterior distribution. The originality of the devised algorithms stems from combining a Langevin Monte Carlo sampling scheme with Proximal operators. Performance of the new algorithms in producing relevant credibility intervals for the reproduction number estimates and denoised counts are compared. Assessment is conducted on real daily new infection counts made available by the Johns Hopkins University. The interest of the devised monitoring tools are illustrated on Covid19 data from several different countries.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Temporal evolution of the Covid19 pandemic reproduction number: Estimations from proximal optimization to Monte Carlo sampling

Monitoring the evolution of the Covid19 pandemic constitutes a critical step in sanitary policy design. Yet, the assessment of the pandemic intensity within the pandemic period remains a challenging task because of the limited quality of data made available by public health authorities (missing data, outliers and pseudoseasonalities, notably), that calls for cumbersome and ad-hoc preprocessing (denoising) prior to estimation. Recently, the estimation of the reproduction number, a measure of the pandemic intensity, was formulated as an inverse problem, combining data-model fidelity and space-time regularity constraints, solved by nonsmooth convex proximal minimizations. Though promising, that formulation lacks robustness against the limited quality of the Covid19 data and confidence assessment. The present work aims to address both limitations: First, it discusses solutions to produce a robust assessment of the pandemic intensity by accounting for the low quality of the data directly within the inverse problem formulation. Second, exploiting a Bayesian interpretation of the inverse problem formulation, it devises a Monte Carlo sampling strategy, tailored to a nonsmooth log-concave a posteriori distribution, to produce relevant credibility intervalbased estimates for the Covid19 reproduction number. Clinical relevance Applied to daily counts of new infections made publicly available by the Health Authorities for around 200 countries, the proposed procedures permit robust assessments of the time evolution of the Covid19 pandemic intensity, updated automatically and on a daily basis.

q-bio.PE↗

arXiv2021

Federated Expectation Maximization with heterogeneity mitigation and variance reduction

The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is the default algorithm for inference in latent variable models. As in any other field of machine learning, applications of latent variable models to very large datasets make the use of advanced parallel and distributed architectures mandatory. This paper introduces FedEM, which is the first extension of the EM algorithm to the federated learning context. FedEM is a new communication efficient method, which handles partial participation of local devices, and is robust to heterogeneous distributions of the datasets. To alleviate the communication bottleneck, FedEM compresses appropriately defined complete data sufficient statistics. We also develop and analyze an extension of FedEM to further incorporate a variance reduction scheme. In all cases, we derive finite-time complexity bounds for smooth non-convex problems. Numerical results are presented to support our theoretical findings, as well as an application to federated missing values imputation for biodiversity monitoring.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

The Perturbed Prox-Preconditioned SPIDER algorithm for EM-based large scale learning

Incremental Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithms were introduced to design EM for the large scale learning framework by avoiding the full data set to be processed at each iteration. Nevertheless, these algorithms all assume that the conditional expectations of the sufficient statistics are explicit. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named Perturbed Prox-Preconditioned SPIDER (3P-SPIDER), which builds on the Stochastic Path Integral Differential EstimatoR EM (SPIDER-EM) algorithm. The 3P-SPIDER algorithm addresses many intractabilities of the E-step of EM; it also deals with non-smooth regularization and convex constraint set. Numerical experiments show that 3P-SPIDER outperforms other incremental EM methods and discuss the role of some design parameters.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

The perturbed prox-preconditioned spider algorithm: non-asymptotic convergence bounds

A novel algorithm named Perturbed Prox-Preconditioned SPIDER (3P-SPIDER) is introduced. It is a stochastic variancereduced proximal-gradient type algorithm built on Stochastic Path Integral Differential EstimatoR (SPIDER), an algorithm known to achieve near-optimal first-order oracle inequality for nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization. Compared to the vanilla prox-SPIDER, 3P-SPIDER uses preconditioned gradient estimators. Preconditioning can either be applied "explicitly" to a gradient estimator or be introduced "implicitly" as in applications to the EM algorithm. 3P-SPIDER also assumes that the preconditioned gradients may (possibly) be not known in closed analytical form and therefore must be approximated which adds an additional degree of perturbation. Studying the convergence in expectation, we show that 3P-SPIDER achieves a near-optimal oracle inequality O(n^(1/2) /epsilon) where n is the number of observations and epsilon the target precision even when the gradient is estimated by Monte Carlo methods. We illustrate the algorithm on an application to the minimization of a penalized empirical loss.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Fast Incremental Expectation Maximization for finite-sum optimization: nonasymptotic convergence

Fast Incremental Expectation Maximization (FIEM) is a version of the EM framework for large datasets. In this paper, we first recast FIEM and other incremental EM type algorithms in the {\em Stochastic Approximation within EM} framework. Then, we provide nonasymptotic bounds for the convergence in expectation as a function of the number of examples $n$ and of the maximal number of iterations $\kmax$. We propose two strategies for achieving an $ε$-approximate stationary point, respectively with $\kmax = O(n^{2/3}/ε)$ and $\kmax = O(\sqrt{n}/ε^{3/2})$, both strategies relying on a random termination rule before $\kmax$ and on a constant step size in the Stochastic Approximation step. Our bounds provide some improvements on the literature. First, they allow $\kmax$ to scale as $\sqrt{n}$ which is better than $n^{2/3}$ which was the best rate obtained so far; it is at the cost of a larger dependence upon the tolerance $ε$, thus making this control relevant for small to medium accuracy with respect to the number of examples $n$. Second, for the $n^{2/3}$-rate, the numerical illustrations show that thanks to an optimized choice of the step size and of the bounds in terms of quantities characterizing the optimization problem at hand, our results desig a less conservative choice of the step size and provide a better control of the convergence in expectation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

A Stochastic Path-Integrated Differential EstimatoR Expectation Maximization Algorithm

The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is of key importance for inference in latent variable models including mixture of regressors and experts, missing observations. This paper introduces a novel EM algorithm, called \texttt{SPIDER-EM}, for inference from a training set of size $n$, $n \gg 1$. At the core of our algorithm is an estimator of the full conditional expectation in the {\sf E}-step, adapted from the stochastic path-integrated differential estimator ({\tt SPIDER}) technique. We derive finite-time complexity bounds for smooth non-convex likelihood: we show that for convergence to an $ε$-approximate stationary point, the complexity scales as $K_{\operatorname{Opt}} (n,ε)={\cal O}(ε^{-1})$ and $K_{\operatorname{CE}}( n,ε) = n+ \sqrt{n} {\cal O}(ε^{-1} )$, where $K_{\operatorname{Opt}}( n,ε)$ and $K_{\operatorname{CE}}(n, ε)$ are respectively the number of {\sf M}-steps and the number of per-sample conditional expectations evaluations. This improves over the state-of-the-art algorithms. Numerical results support our findings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Geom-SPIDER-EM: Faster Variance Reduced Stochastic Expectation Maximization for Nonconvex Finite-Sum Optimization

The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is a key reference for inference in latent variable models; unfortunately, its computational cost is prohibitive in the large scale learning setting. In this paper, we propose an extension of the Stochastic Path-Integrated Differential EstimatoR EM (SPIDER-EM) and derive complexity bounds for this novel algorithm, designed to solve smooth nonconvex finite-sum optimization problems. We show that it reaches the same state of the art complexity bounds as SPIDER-EM; and provide conditions for a linear rate of convergence. Numerical results support our findings.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2017

Stochastic Proximal Gradient Algorithms for Penalized Mixed Models

Motivated by penalized likelihood maximization in complex models, we study optimization problems where neither the function to optimize nor its gradient have an explicit expression, but its gradient can be approximated by a Monte Carlo technique. We propose a new algorithm based on a stochastic approximation of the Proximal-Gradient (PG) algorithm. This new algorithm, named Stochastic Approximation PG (SAPG) is the combination of a stochastic gradient descent step which - roughly speaking - computes a smoothed approximation of the past gradient along the iterations, and a proximal step. The choice of the step size and the Monte Carlo batch size for the stochastic gradient descent step in SAPG are discussed. Our convergence results cover the cases of biased and unbiased Monte Carlo approximations. While the convergence analysis of the Monte Carlo-PG is already addressed in the literature (see Atchadé et al. [2016]), the convergence analysis of SAPG is new. The two algorithms are compared on a linear mixed effect model as a toy example. A more challenging application is proposed on non-linear mixed effect models in high dimension with a pharmacokinetic data set including genomic covariates. To our best knowledge, our work provides the first convergence result of a numerical method designed to solve penalized Maximum Likelihood in a non-linear mixed effect model.

stat.CO↗

arXiv2017

Convergence and efficiency of adaptive importance sampling techniques with partial biasing

We consider a generalization of the discrete-time Self Healing Umbrella Sampling method, which is an adaptive importance technique useful to sample multimodal target distributions. The importance function is based on the weights (namely the relative probabilities) of disjoint sets which form a partition of the space. These weights are unknown but are learnt on the fly yielding an adaptive algorithm. In the context of computational statistical physics, the logarithm of these weights is, up to a multiplicative constant, the free energy, and the discrete valued function defining the partition is called the collective variable. The algorithm falls into the general class of Wang-Landau type methods, and is a generalization of the original Self Healing Umbrella Sampling method in two ways: (i) the updating strategy leads to a larger penalization strength of already visited sets in order to escape more quickly from metastable states, and (ii) the target distribution is biased using only a fraction of the free energy, in order to increase the effective sample size and reduce the variance of importance sampling estimators. The algorithm can also be seen as a generalization of well-tempered metadynamics. We prove the convergence of the algorithm and analyze numerically its efficiency on a toy example.

math.PR↗

arXiv2016

On perturbed proximal gradient algorithms

We study a version of the proximal gradient algorithm for which the gradient is intractable and is approximated by Monte Carlo methods (and in particular Markov Chain Monte Carlo). We derive conditions on the step size and the Monte Carlo batch size under which convergence is guaranteed: both increasing batch size and constant batch size are considered. We also derive non-asymptotic bounds for an averaged version. Our results cover both the cases of biased and unbiased Monte Carlo approximation. To support our findings, we discuss the inference of a sparse generalized linear model with random effect and the problem of learning the edge structure and parameters of sparse undirected graphical models.

math.ST↗

arXiv2016

Fixed Rank Kriging for Cellular Coverage Analysis

Coverage planning and optimization is one of the most crucial tasks for a radio network operator. Efficient coverage optimization requires accurate coverage estimation. This estimation relies on geo-located field measurements which are gathered today during highly expensive drive tests (DT); and will be reported in the near future by users' mobile devices thanks to the 3GPP Minimizing Drive Tests (MDT) feature~\cite{3GPPproposal}. This feature consists in an automatic reporting of the radio measurements associated with the geographic location of the user's mobile device. Such a solution is still costly in terms of battery consumption and signaling overhead. Therefore, predicting the coverage on a location where no measurements are available remains a key and challenging task. This paper describes a powerful tool that gives an accurate coverage prediction on the whole area of interest: it builds a coverage map by spatially interpolating geo-located measurements using the Kriging technique. The paper focuses on the reduction of the computational complexity of the Kriging algorithm by applying Fixed Rank Kriging (FRK). The performance evaluation of the FRK algorithm both on simulated measurements and real field measurements shows a good trade-off between prediction efficiency and computational complexity. In order to go a step further towards the operational application of the proposed algorithm, a multicellular use-case is studied. Simulation results show a good performance in terms of coverage prediction and detection of the best serving cell.

cs.OH↗

arXiv2016

Spatial Prediction Under Location Uncertainty In Cellular Networks

Coverage optimization is an important process for the operator as it is a crucial prerequisite towards offering a satisfactory quality of service to the end-users. The first step of this process is coverage prediction, which can be performed by interpolating geo-located measurements reported to the network by mobile users' equipments. In previous works, we proposed a low complexity coverage prediction algorithm based on the adaptation of the Geo-statistics Fixed Rank Kriging (FRK) algorithm. We supposed that the geo-location information reported with the radio measurements was perfect, which is not the case in reality. In this paper, we study the impact of location uncertainty on the coverage prediction accuracy and we extend the previously proposed algorithm to include geo-location error in the prediction model. We validate the proposed algorithm using both simulated and real field measurements. The FRK extended to take into account the location uncertainty proves to enhance the prediction accuracy while keeping a reasonable computational complexity.

cs.OH↗

arXiv2016

Convergence of Markovian Stochastic Approximation with discontinuous dynamics

This paper is devoted to the convergence analysis of stochastic approximation algorithms of the form $θ\_{n+1} = θ\_n + γ\_{n+1} H\_{θ\_n}(X\_{n+1})$ where $\{θ\_nn, n \geq 0\}$ is a $R^d$-valued sequence, $\{γ, n \geq 0\}$ is a deterministic step-size sequence and $\{X\_n, n \geq 0\}$ is a controlled Markov chain. We study the convergence under weak assumptions on smoothness-in-$θ$ of the function $θ\mapsto H\_θ(x)$. It is usually assumed that this function is continuous for any $x$; in this work, we relax this condition. Our results are illustrated by considering stochastic approximation algorithms for (adaptive) quantile estimation and a penalized version of the vector quantization.

math.ST↗