John C. Duchi

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Online Conformal Prediction via Online Optimization

• Felipe Areces
• Christopher Mohri
• Tatsunori B. Hashimoto
• John C. Duchi

We introduce a family of algorithms for online conformal prediction with coverage guarantees for both adversarial and stochastic data. In the adversarial setting, we establish the standard guarantee: over time, a pre-specified target fraction of confidence sets cover the ground truth. For stochastic data, we provide a guarantee at every time instead of just on average over time: the probability that a confidence set covers the ground truth—conditioned on past observations—converges to a pre-specified target when the conditional quantiles of the errors are a linear function of past data. Complementary to our theory, our experiments spanning over $15$ datasets suggest that the performance improvement of our methods over baselines grows with the magnitude of the data’s dependence, even when baselines are tuned on the test set. We put these findings to the test by pre-registering an experiment for electricity demand forecasting in Texas, where our algorithms achieve over a $10$% reduction in confidence set sizes, a more than a $30$% improvement in quantile and absolute losses with respect to the observed errors, and significant outcomes on all $78$ out of $78$ pre-registered hypotheses. We provide documentation for the pypi package implementing our algorithms here: https: //conformalopt. readthedocs. io/.

JMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

Predictive Inference with Weak Supervision

• Maxime Cauchois
• Suyash Gupta
• Alnur Ali
• John C. Duchi

The expense of acquiring labels in large-scale statistical machine learning makes partially and weakly-labeled data attractive, though it is not always apparent how to leverage such data for model fitting or validation. We present a methodology to bridge the gap between partial supervision and validation, developing a conformal prediction framework to provide valid predictive confidence sets---sets that cover a true label with a prescribed probability, independent of the underlying distribution---using weakly labeled data. To do so, we introduce a (necessary) new notion of coverage and predictive validity, then develop several application scenarios, providing efficient algorithms for classification and several large-scale structured prediction problems. We corroborate the hypothesis that the new coverage definition allows for tighter and more informative (but valid) confidence sets through several experiments. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2024. ( edit, beta )

NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Collaboratively Learning Linear Models with Structured Missing Data

• Chen Cheng
• Gary Cheng
• John C. Duchi

We study the problem of collaboratively learning least squares estimates for $m$ agents. Each agent observes a different subset of the features---e. g. , containing data collected from sensors of varying resolution. Our goal is to determine how to coordinate the agents in order to produce the best estimator for each agent. We propose a distributed, semi-supervised algorithm Collab, consisting of three steps: local training, aggregation, and distribution. Our procedure does not require communicating the labeled data, making it communication efficient and useful in settings where the labeled data is inaccessible. Despite this handicap, our procedure is nearly asymptotically, local-minimax optimal---even among estimators allowed to communicate the labeled data such as imputation methods. We test our method on US Census data. We also discuss generalizations of our method to non-Gaussian feature settings, non-linear settings, and Federated Learning.

ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Accelerated, Optimal and Parallel: Some results on model-based stochastic optimization

• Karan N. Chadha
• Gary Cheng 0004
• John C. Duchi

The Approximate-Proximal Point (APROX) family of model-based stochastic optimization algorithms improve over standard stochastic gradient methods, as they are robust to step size choices, adaptive to problem difficulty, converge on a broader range of problems than stochastic gradient methods, and converge very fast on interpolation problems, all while retaining nice minibatching properties \cite{AsiDu19siopt, AsiChChDu20}. In this paper, we propose an acceleration scheme for the APROX family and provide non-asymptotic convergence guarantees, which are order-optimal in all problem-dependent constants and provide even larger minibatching speedups. For interpolation problems where the objective satisfies additional growth conditions, we show that our algorithm achieves linear convergence rates for a wide range of stepsizes. In this setting, we also prove matching lower bounds, identifying new fundamental constants and showing the optimality of the APROX family. We corroborate our theoretical results with empirical testing to demonstrate the gains accurate modeling, acceleration, and minibatching provide.

ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Private optimization in the interpolation regime: faster rates and hardness results

• Hilal Asi
• Karan N. Chadha
• Gary Cheng 0004
• John C. Duchi

In non-private stochastic convex optimization, stochastic gradient methods converge much faster on interpolation problems—namely, problems where there exists a solution that simultaneously minimizes all of the sample losses—than on non-interpolating ones; similar improvements are not known in the private setting. In this paper, we investigate differentially private stochastic optimization in the interpolation regime. First, we show that without additional assumptions, interpolation problems do not exhibit an improved convergence rates with differential privacy. However, when the functions exhibit quadratic growth around the optimum, we show (near) exponential improvements in the private sample complexity. In particular, we propose an adaptive algorithm that improves the sample complexity to achieve expected error $\alpha$ from $\frac{d}{\diffp \sqrt{\alpha}}$ to $\frac{1}{\alpha^\rho} + \frac{d}{\diffp} \log\paren{\frac{1}{\alpha}}$ for any fixed $\rho >0$, while retaining the standard minimax-optimal sample complexity for non-interpolation problems. We prove a lower bound that shows the dimension-dependent term in the expression above is tight. Furthermore, we provide a superefficiency result which demonstrates the necessity of the polynomial term for adaptive algorithms: any algorithm that has a polylogarithmic sample complexity for interpolation problems cannot achieve the minimax-optimal rates for the family of non-interpolation problems.

NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Subspace Recovery from Heterogeneous Data with Non-isotropic Noise

• John C. Duchi
• Vitaly Feldman
• Lunjia Hu
• Kunal Talwar

Recovering linear subspaces from data is a fundamental and important task in statistics and machine learning. Motivated by heterogeneity in Federated Learning settings, we study a basic formulation of this problem: the principal component analysis (PCA), with a focus on dealing with irregular noise. Our data come from $n$ users with user $i$ contributing data samples from a $d$-dimensional distribution with mean $\mu_i$. Our goal is to recover the linear subspace shared by $\mu_1, \ldots, \mu_n$ using the data points from all users, where every data point from user $i$ is formed by adding an independent mean-zero noise vector to $\mu_i$. If we only have one data point from every user, subspace recovery is information-theoretically impossible when the covariance matrices of the noise vectors can be non-spherical, necessitating additional restrictive assumptions in previous work. We avoid these assumptions by leveraging at least two data points from each user, which allows us to design an efficiently-computable estimator under non-spherical and user-dependent noise. We prove an upper bound for the estimation error of our estimator in general scenarios where the number of data points and amount of noise can vary across users, and prove an information-theoretic error lower bound that not only matches the upper bound up to a constant factor, but also holds even for spherical Gaussian noise. This implies that our estimator does not introduce additional estimation error (up to a constant factor) due to irregularity in the noise. We show additional results for a linear regression problem in a similar setup.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Adapting to function difficulty and growth conditions in private optimization

• Hilal Asi
• Daniel Levy
• John C. Duchi

We develop algorithms for private stochastic convex optimization that adapt to the hardness of the specific function we wish to optimize. While previous work provide worst-case bounds for arbitrary convex functions, it is often the case that the function at hand belongs to a smaller class that enjoys faster rates. Concretely, we show that for functions exhibiting $\kappa$-growth around the optimum, i. e. , $f(x) \ge f(x^\star) + \lambda \kappa^{-1} \|x-x^\star\|_2^\kappa$ for $\kappa > 1$, our algorithms improve upon the standard ${\sqrt{d}}/{n\varepsilon}$ privacy rate to the faster $({\sqrt{d}}/{n\varepsilon})^{\tfrac{\kappa}{\kappa - 1}}$. Crucially, they achieve these rates without knowledge of the growth constant $\kappa$ of the function. Our algorithms build upon the inverse sensitivity mechanism, which adapts to instance difficulty [2], and recent localization techniques in private optimization [25]. We complement our algorithms with matching lower bounds for these function classes and demonstrate that our adaptive algorithm is simultaneously (minimax) optimal over all $\kappa \ge 1+c$ whenever $c = \Theta(1)$.

JMLR Journal 2021 Journal Article

Knowing what You Know: valid and validated confidence sets in multiclass and multilabel prediction

• Maxime Cauchois
• Suyash Gupta
• John C. Duchi

We develop conformal prediction methods for constructing valid predictive confidence sets in multiclass and multilabel problems without assumptions on the data generating distribution. A challenge here is that typical conformal prediction methods---which give marginal validity (coverage) guarantees---provide uneven coverage, in that they address easy examples at the expense of essentially ignoring difficult examples. By leveraging ideas from quantile regression, we build methods that always guarantee correct coverage but additionally provide (asymptotically consistent) conditional coverage for both multiclass and multilabel prediction problems. To address the potential challenge of exponentially large confidence sets in multilabel prediction, we build tree-structured classifiers that efficiently account for interactions between labels. Our methods can be bolted on top of any classification model---neural network, random forest, boosted tree---to guarantee its validity. We also provide an empirical evaluation, simultaneously providing new validation methods, that suggests the more robust coverage of our confidence sets. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2021. ( edit, beta )

ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Private Adaptive Gradient Methods for Convex Optimization

• Hilal Asi
• John C. Duchi
• Alireza Fallah 0001
• Omid Javidbakht
• Kunal Talwar

We study adaptive methods for differentially private convex optimization, proposing and analyzing differentially private variants of a Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm with adaptive stepsizes, as well as the AdaGrad algorithm. We provide upper bounds on the regret of both algorithms and show that the bounds are (worst-case) optimal. As a consequence of our development, we show that our private versions of AdaGrad outperform adaptive SGD, which in turn outperforms traditional SGD in scenarios with non-isotropic gradients where (non-private) Adagrad provably outperforms SGD. The major challenge is that the isotropic noise typically added for privacy dominates the signal in gradient geometry for high-dimensional problems; approaches to this that effectively optimize over lower-dimensional subspaces simply ignore the actual problems that varying gradient geometries introduce. In contrast, we study non-isotropic clipping and noise addition, developing a principled theoretical approach; the consequent procedures also enjoy significantly stronger empirical performance than prior approaches.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Conic Descent and its Application to Memory-efficient Optimization over Positive Semidefinite Matrices

• John C. Duchi
• Oliver Hinder
• Andrew Naber
• Yinyu Ye

We present an extension of the conditional gradient method to problems whose feasible sets are convex cones. We provide a convergence analysis for the method and for variants with nonconvex objectives, and we extend the analysis to practical cases with effective line search strategies. For the specific case of the positive semidefinite cone, we present a memory-efficient version based on randomized matrix sketches and advocate a heuristic greedy step that greatly improves its practical performance. Numerical results on phase retrieval and matrix completion problems indicate that our method can offer substantial advantages over traditional conditional gradient and Burer-Monteiro approaches.

ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

FormulaZero: Distributionally Robust Online Adaptation via Offline Population Synthesis

• Aman Sinha 0001
• Matthew O'Kelly
• Hongrui Zheng
• Rahul Mangharam
• John C. Duchi
• Russ Tedrake

Balancing performance and safety is crucial to deploying autonomous vehicles in multi-agent environments. In particular, autonomous racing is a domain that penalizes safe but conservative policies, highlighting the need for robust, adaptive strategies. Current approaches either make simplifying assumptions about other agents or lack robust mechanisms for online adaptation. This work makes algorithmic contributions to both challenges. First, to generate a realistic, diverse set of opponents, we develop a novel method for self-play based on replica-exchange Markov chain Monte Carlo. Second, we propose a distributionally robust bandit optimization procedure that adaptively adjusts risk aversion relative to uncertainty in beliefs about opponents’ behaviors. We rigorously quantify the tradeoffs in performance and robustness when approximating these computations in real-time motion-planning, and we demonstrate our methods experimentally on autonomous vehicles that achieve scaled speeds comparable to Formula One racecars.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Instance-optimality in differential privacy via approximate inverse sensitivity mechanisms

• Hilal Asi
• John C. Duchi

We study and provide instance-optimal algorithms in differential privacy by extending and approximating the inverse sensitivity mechanism. We provide two approximation frameworks, one which only requires knowledge of local sensitivities, and a gradient-based approximation for optimization problems, which are efficiently computable for a broad class of functions. We complement our analysis with instance-specific lower bounds for vector-valued functions, which demonstrate that our mechanisms are (nearly) instance-optimal under certain assumptions and that minimax lower bounds may not provide an accurate estimate of the hardness of a problem in general: our algorithms can significantly outperform minimax bounds for well-behaved instances. Finally, we use our approximation framework to develop private mechanisms for unbounded-range mean estimation, principal component analysis, and linear regression. For PCA, our mechanisms give an efficient (pure) differentially private algorithm with near-optimal rates.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Large-Scale Methods for Distributionally Robust Optimization

• Daniel Levy
• Yair Carmon
• John C. Duchi
• Aaron Sidford

We propose and analyze algorithms for distributionally robust optimization of convex losses with conditional value at risk (CVaR) and $\chi^2$ divergence uncertainty sets. We prove that our algorithms require a number of gradient evaluations independent of training set size and number of parameters, making them suitable for large-scale applications. For $\chi^2$ uncertainty sets these are the first such guarantees in the literature, and for CVaR our guarantees scale linearly in the uncertainty level rather than quadratically as in previous work. We also provide lower bounds proving the worst-case optimality of our algorithms for CVaR and a penalized version of the $\chi^2$ problem. Our primary technical contributions are novel bounds on the bias of batch robust risk estimation and the variance of a multilevel Monte Carlo gradient estimator due to [Blanchet & Glynn, 2015]. Experiments on MNIST and ImageNet confirm the theoretical scaling of our algorithms, which are 9-36 times more efficient than full-batch methods.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Minibatch Stochastic Approximate Proximal Point Methods

• Hilal Asi
• Karan Chadha
• Gary Cheng
• John C. Duchi

We extend the Approximate-Proximal Point (aProx) family of model-based methods for solving stochastic convex optimization problems, including stochastic subgradient, proximal point, and bundle methods, to the minibatch setting. To do this, we propose two minibatched algorithms for which we prove a non-asymptotic upper bound on the rate of convergence, revealing a linear speedup in minibatch size. In contrast to standard stochastic gradient methods, these methods may have linear speedup in the minibatch setting even for non-smooth functions. Our algorithms maintain the desirable traits characteristic of the aProx family, such as robustness to initial step size choice. Additionally, we show improved convergence rates for "interpolation" problems, which (for example) gives a new parallelization strategy for alternating projections. We corroborate our theoretical results with extensive empirical testing, which demonstrates the gains provided by accurate modeling and minibatching.

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Neural Bridge Sampling for Evaluating Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems

• Aman Sinha
• Matthew O'Kelly
• Russ Tedrake
• John C. Duchi

Learning-based methodologies increasingly find applications in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving and medical robotics. Due to the rare nature of dangerous events, real-world testing is prohibitively expensive and unscalable. In this work, we employ a probabilistic approach to safety evaluation in simulation, where we are concerned with computing the probability of dangerous events. We develop a novel rare-event simulation method that combines exploration, exploitation, and optimization techniques to find failure modes and estimate their rate of occurrence. We provide rigorous guarantees for the performance of our method in terms of both statistical and computational efficiency. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on a variety of scenarios, illustrating its usefulness as a tool for rapid sensitivity analysis and model comparison that are essential to developing and testing safety-critical autonomous systems.

ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Understanding and Mitigating the Tradeoff between Robustness and Accuracy

• Aditi Raghunathan
• Sang Michael Xie
• Fanny Yang
• John C. Duchi
• Percy Liang

Adversarial training augments the training set with perturbations to improve the robust error (over worst-case perturbations), but it often leads to an increase in the standard error (on unperturbed test inputs). Previous explanations for this tradeoff rely on the assumption that no predictor in the hypothesis class has low standard and robust error. In this work, we precisely characterize the effect of augmentation on the standard error in linear regression when the optimal linear predictor has zero standard and robust error. In particular, we show that the standard error could increase even when the augmented perturbations have noiseless observations from the optimal linear predictor. We then prove that the recently proposed robust self-training (RST) estimator improves robust error without sacrificing standard error for noiseless linear regression. Empirically, for neural networks, we find that RST with different adversarial training methods improves both standard and robust error for random and adversarial rotations and adversarial l_infty perturbations in CIFAR-10.

ICLR Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Certifying Some Distributional Robustness with Principled Adversarial Training

• Aman Sinha 0001
• Hongseok Namkoong
• John C. Duchi

Neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples and researchers have proposed many heuristic attack and defense mechanisms. We address this problem through the principled lens of distributionally robust optimization, which guarantees performance under adversarial input perturbations. By considering a Lagrangian penalty formulation of perturbing the underlying data distribution in a Wasserstein ball, we provide a training procedure that augments model parameter updates with worst-case perturbations of training data. For smooth losses, our procedure provably achieves moderate levels of robustness with little computational or statistical cost relative to empirical risk minimization. Furthermore, our statistical guarantees allow us to efficiently certify robustness for the population loss. For imperceptible perturbations, our method matches or outperforms heuristic approaches.

ICML Conference 2017 Conference Paper

"Convex Until Proven Guilty": Dimension-Free Acceleration of Gradient Descent on Non-Convex Functions

• Yair Carmon
• John C. Duchi
• Oliver Hinder
• Aaron Sidford

We develop and analyze a variant of Nesterov’s accelerated gradient descent (AGD) for minimization of smooth non-convex functions. We prove that one of two cases occurs: either our AGD variant converges quickly, as if the function was convex, or we produce a certificate that the function is “guilty” of being non-convex. This non-convexity certificate allows us to exploit negative curvature and obtain deterministic, dimension-free acceleration of convergence for non-convex functions. For a function $f$ with Lipschitz continuous gradient and Hessian, we compute a point $x$ with $\|\nabla f(x)\| \le \epsilon$ in $O(\epsilon^{-7/4} \log(1/ \epsilon) )$ gradient and function evaluations. Assuming additionally that the third derivative is Lipschitz, we require only $O(\epsilon^{-5/3} \log(1/ \epsilon) )$ evaluations.

ICML Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Adaptive Sampling Probabilities for Non-Smooth Optimization

• Hongseok Namkoong
• Aman Sinha 0001
• Steve Yadlowsky
• John C. Duchi

Standard forms of coordinate and stochastic gradient methods do not adapt to structure in data; their good behavior under random sampling is predicated on uniformity in data. When gradients in certain blocks of features (for coordinate descent) or examples (for SGD) are larger than others, there is a natural structure that can be exploited for quicker convergence. Yet adaptive variants often suffer nontrivial computational overhead. We present a framework that discovers and leverages such structural properties at a low computational cost. We employ a bandit optimization procedure that “learns” probabilities for sampling coordinates or examples in (non-smooth) optimization problems, allowing us to guarantee performance close to that of the optimal stationary sampling distribution. When such structures exist, our algorithms achieve tighter convergence guarantees than their non-adaptive counterparts, and we complement our analysis with experiments on several datasets.

ICML Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Estimation from Indirect Supervision with Linear Moments

• Aditi Raghunathan
• Roy Frostig
• John C. Duchi
• Percy Liang

In structured prediction problems where we have indirect supervision of the output, maximum marginal likelihood faces two computational obstacles: non-convexity of the objective and intractability of even a single gradient computation. In this paper, we bypass both obstacles for a class of what we call linear indirectly-supervised problems. Our approach is simple: we solve a linear system to estimate sufficient statistics of the model, which we then use to estimate parameters via convex optimization. We analyze the statistical properties of our approach and show empirically that it is effective in two settings: learning with local privacy constraints and learning from low-cost count-based annotations.

JMLR Journal 2013 Journal Article

Communication-Efficient Algorithms for Statistical Optimization

• Yuchen Zhang
• John C. Duchi
• Martin J. Wainwright

We analyze two communication-efficient algorithms for distributed optimization in statistical settings involving large-scale data sets. The first algorithm is a standard averaging method that distributes the $N$ data samples evenly to $m$ machines, performs separate minimization on each subset, and then averages the estimates. We provide a sharp analysis of this average mixture algorithm, showing that under a reasonable set of conditions, the combined parameter achieves mean-squared error (MSE) that decays as $O(N^{-1}+(N/m)^{-2})$. Whenever $m \le \sqrt{N}$, this guarantee matches the best possible rate achievable by a centralized algorithm having access to all $N$ samples. The second algorithm is a novel method, based on an appropriate form of bootstrap subsampling. Requiring only a single round of communication, it has mean-squared error that decays as $O(N^{-1}+(N/m)^{-3})$, and so is more robust to the amount of parallelization. In addition, we show that a stochastic gradient-based method attains mean- squared error decaying as $O(N^{-1}+(N/m)^{-3/2})$, easing computation at the expense of a potentially slower MSE rate. We also provide an experimental evaluation of our methods, investigating their performance both on simulated data and on a large-scale regression problem from the internet search domain. In particular, we show that our methods can be used to efficiently solve an advertisement prediction problem from the Chinese SoSo Search Engine, which involves logistic regression with $N \approx 2.4 \times 10^8$ samples and $d \approx 740,\!000$ covariates. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2013. ( edit, beta )

FOCS Conference 2013 Conference Paper

Local Privacy and Statistical Minimax Rates

• John C. Duchi
• Michael I. Jordan
• Martin J. Wainwright

Working under local differential privacy-a model of privacy in which data remains private even from the statistician or learner-we study the tradeoff between privacy guarantees and the utility of the resulting statistical estimators. We prove bounds on information-theoretic quantities, including mutual information and Kullback-Leibler divergence, that influence estimation rates as a function of the amount of privacy preserved. When combined with minimax techniques such as Le Cam's and Fano's methods, these inequalities allow for a precise characterization of statistical rates under local privacy constraints. In this paper, we provide a treatment of two canonical problem families: mean estimation in location family models and convex risk minimization. For these families, we provide lower and upper bounds for estimation of population quantities that match up to constant factors, giving privacy-preserving mechanisms and computationally efficient estimators that achieve the bounds.

ICML Conference 2010 Conference Paper

On the Consistency of Ranking Algorithms

• John C. Duchi
• Lester W. Mackey
• Michael I. Jordan

ICML Conference 2009 Conference Paper

Boosting with structural sparsity

• John C. Duchi
• Yoram Singer

UAI Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Constrained Approximate Maximum Entropy Learning of Markov Random Fields

• Varun Ganapathi
• David Vickrey
• John C. Duchi
• Daphne Koller

Parameter estimation in Markov random fields (MRFs) is a difficult task, in which inference over the network is run in the inner loop of a gradient descent procedure. Replacing exact inference with approximate methods such as loopy belief propagation (LBP) can suffer from poor convergence. In this paper, we provide a different approach for combining MRF learning and Bethe approximation. We consider the dual of maximum likelihood Markov network learning — maximizing entropy with moment matching constraints — and then approximate both the objective and the constraints in the resulting optimization problem. Unlike previous work along these lines (Teh & Welling, 2003), our formulation allows parameter sharing between features in a general log-linear model, parameter regularization and conditional training. We show that piecewise training (Sutton & McCallum, 2005) is a very restricted special case of this formulation. We study two optimization strategies: one based on a single convex approximation and one that uses repeated convex approximations. We show results on several real-world networks that demonstrate that these algorithms can significantly outperform learning with loopy and piecewise. Our results also provide a framework for analyzing the trade-offs of different relaxations of the entropy objective and of the constraints.

ICML Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Efficient projections onto the l 1 -ball for learning in high dimensions

• John C. Duchi
• Shai Shalev-Shwartz
• Yoram Singer
• Tushar Chandra

We describe efficient algorithms for projecting a vector onto the l 1 -ball. We present two methods for projection. The first performs exact projection in O(n) expected time, where n is the dimension of the space. The second works on vectors k of whose elements are perturbed outside the l 1 -ball, projecting in O(k log( n )) time. This setting is especially useful for online learning in sparse feature spaces such as text categorization applications. We demonstrate the merits and effectiveness of our algorithms in numerous batch and online learning tasks. We show that variants of stochastic gradient projection methods augmented with our efficient projection procedures outperform interior point methods, which are considered state-of-the-art optimization techniques. We also show that in online settings gradient updates with l 1 projections outperform the exponentiated gradient algorithm while obtaining models with high degrees of sparsity.

UAI Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Projected Subgradient Methods for Learning Sparse Gaussians

• John C. Duchi
• Stephen Gould
• Daphne Koller

Gaussian Markov random fields (GMRFs) are useful in a broad range of applications. In this paper we tackle the problem of learning a sparse GMRF in a high-dimensional space. Our approach uses the ℓ1-norm as a regularization on the inverse covariance matrix. We utilize a novel projected gradient method, which is faster than previous methods in practice and equal to the best performing of these in asymptotic complexity. We also extend the ℓ1-regularized objective to the problem of sparsifying entire blocks within the inverse covariance matrix. Our methods generalize fairly easily to this case, while other methods do not. We demonstrate that our extensions give better generalization performance on two real domains—biological network analysis and a 2D-shape modeling image task.