Related papers: Bayesian Posterior Sampling via Stochastic Gradien…

We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…

A new approach in stochastic optimization via the use of stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) algorithms, which is a variant of stochastic gradient decent (SGD) methods, allows us to efficiently approximate global minimizers of…

Bayesian shrinkage methods have generated a lot of recent interest as tools for high-dimensional regression and model selection. These methods naturally facilitate tractable uncertainty quantification and incorporation of prior information.…

While low-precision optimization has been widely used to accelerate deep learning, low-precision sampling remains largely unexplored. As a consequence, sampling is simply infeasible in many large-scale scenarios, despite providing…

Using quasi-Newton methods in stochastic optimization is not a trivial task given the difficulty of extracting curvature information from the noisy gradients. Moreover, pre-conditioning noisy gradient observations tend to amplify the noise.…

Bayesian modelling enables us to accommodate complex forms of data and make a comprehensive inference, but the effect of partial misspecification of the model is a concern. One approach in this setting is to modularize the model, and…

The algorithms used to train neural networks, like stochastic gradient descent (SGD), have close parallels to natural processes that navigate a high-dimensional parameter space -- for example protein folding or evolution. Our study uses a…

In recent years, the shortcomings of Bayesian posteriors as inferential devices have received increased attention. A popular strategy for fixing them has been to instead target a Gibbs measure based on losses that connect a parameter of…

Sequential Monte Carlo samplers represent a compelling approach to posterior inference in Bayesian models, due to being parallelisable and providing an unbiased estimate of the posterior normalising constant. In this work, we significantly…

Importance sampling is a popular technique in Bayesian inference: by reweighting samples drawn from a proposal distribution we are able to obtain samples and moment estimates from a Bayesian posterior over latent variables. Recent work,…

The Bayesian approach to inverse problems typically relies on posterior sampling approaches, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo, for which the generation of each sample requires one or more evaluations of the parameter-to-observable map or…

Bayesian optimization devolves the global optimization of a costly objective function to the global optimization of a sequence of acquisition functions. This inner-loop optimization can be catastrophically difficult if it involves posterior…

Bayesian inference allows us to define a posterior distribution over the weights of a generic neural network (NN). Exact posteriors are usually intractable, in which case approximations can be employed. One such approximation - variational…

We propose and analyze a generalized splitting method to sample approximately from a distribution conditional on the occurrence of a rare event. This has important applications in a variety of contexts in operations research, engineering,…

The problem of Bayesian reduced rank regression is considered in this paper. We propose, for the first time, to use Langevin Monte Carlo method in this problem. A spectral scaled Student prior distrbution is used to exploit the underlying…

Few-shot classification (FSC), the task of adapting a classifier to unseen classes given a small labeled dataset, is an important step on the path toward human-like machine learning. Bayesian methods are well-suited to tackling the…

Increasingly complex datasets pose a number of challenges for Bayesian inference. Conventional posterior sampling based on Markov chain Monte Carlo can be too computationally intensive, is serial in nature and mixes poorly between posterior…

Approximate Bayesian computation methods are useful for generative models with intractable likelihoods. These methods are however sensitive to the dimension of the parameter space, requiring exponentially increasing resources as this…

Posterior sampling with the spike-and-slab prior [MB88], a popular multimodal distribution used to model uncertainty in variable selection, is considered the theoretical gold standard method for Bayesian sparse linear regression [CPS09,…

The impracticality of posterior sampling has prevented the widespread adoption of spike-and-slab priors in high-dimensional applications. To alleviate the computational burden, optimization strategies have been proposed that quickly find…