Related papers: Adiabatic Persistent Contrastive Divergence Learni…

Contrastive divergence (CD) learning is a classical method for fitting unnormalized statistical models to data samples. Despite its wide-spread use, the convergence properties of this algorithm are still not well understood. The main source…

Energy-Based Models (EBMs) have been widely used for generative modeling. Contrastive Divergence (CD), a prevailing training objective for EBMs, requires sampling from the EBM with Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods (MCMCs), which leads to an…

The Contrastive Divergence (CD) algorithm has achieved notable success in training energy-based models including Restricted Boltzmann Machines and played a key role in the emergence of deep learning. The idea of this algorithm is to…

The Energy-Based Model (EBM) framework is a very general approach to generative modeling that tries to learn and exploit probability distributions only defined though unnormalized scores. It has risen in popularity recently thanks to the…

Estimating the log-likelihood gradient with respect to the parameters of a Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) typically requires sampling using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques. To save computation time, the Markov chains are only…

Energy-based models (EBMs) offer flexible distribution parametrization. However, due to the intractable partition function, they are typically trained via contrastive divergence for maximum likelihood estimation. In this paper, we propose…

Statistical inference methods are fundamentally important in machine learning. Most state-of-the-art inference algorithms are variants of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) or variational inference (VI). However, both methods struggle with…

We develop a method to combine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), leveraging the advantages of both inference approaches. Specifically, we improve the variational distribution by running a few MCMC steps. To…

Automatic differentiation (AD) has driven recent advances in machine learning, including deep neural networks and Hamiltonian Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Partially observed nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems have proved resistant…

We introduce a gradient-based learning method to automatically adapt Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proposal distributions to intractable targets. We define a maximum entropy regularised objective function, referred to as generalised speed…

The learning of domain-invariant representations in the context of domain adaptation with neural networks is considered. We propose a new regularization method that minimizes the discrepancy between domain-specific latent feature…

For large model spaces, the potential entrapment of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based methods with spike-and-slab priors poses significant challenges in posterior computation in regression models. On the other hand, maximum a posteriori…

Bayesian learning in undirected graphical models|computing posterior distributions over parameters and predictive quantities is exceptionally difficult. We conjecture that for general undirected models, there are no tractable MCMC (Markov…

In our recent paper, we showed that in exponential family, contrastive divergence (CD) with fixed learning rate will give asymptotically consistent estimates \cite{wu2016convergence}. In this paper, we establish consistency and convergence…

We propose an empirical Bayes formulation of the structure learning problem, where the prior specification assumes that all node variables have the same error variance, an assumption known to ensure the identifiability of the underlying…

The Expectation Maximisation (EM) algorithm is widely used to optimise non-convex likelihood functions with latent variables. Many authors modified its simple design to fit more specific situations. For instance, the Expectation (E) step…

Contrastive Learning (CL) performances as a rising approach to address the challenge of sparse and noisy recommendation data. Although having achieved promising results, most existing CL methods only perform either hand-crafted data or…

Estimation in the deformable template model is a big challenge in image analysis. The issue is to estimate an atlas of a population. This atlas contains a template and the corresponding geometrical variability of the observed shapes. The…

Inference is typically intractable in high-treewidth undirected graphical models, making maximum likelihood learning a challenge. One way to overcome this is to restrict parameters to a tractable set, most typically the set of…

Contrastive learning is a well-established paradigm in representation learning. The standard framework of contrastive learning minimizes the distance between "similar" instances and maximizes the distance between dissimilar ones in the…