The natural gradient method has been used effectively in conjugate Gaussian process models, but the non-conjugate case has been largely unexplored. We examine how natural gradients can be used in non-conjugate stochastic settings, together with hyperparameter learning. We conclude that the natural gradient can significantly improve performance in terms of wall-clock time. For illconditioned pos...

A new method used to prove the global convergence of the nonlinear conjugate gradient methods, the spectral method, is presented in this paper, and it is applied to a new conjugate gradient algorithm with sufficiently descent property. By analyzing the descent property, several concrete forms of this algorithm are suggested. Under standard Wolfe line searches, the global convergence of the new ...