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The Stein Variational Gradient Descent method is a variational inference method in statistics that has recently received a lot of attention. The method provides a deterministic approximation of the target distribution, by introducing a…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-12-16 José A. Carrillo , Jakub Skrzeczkowski , Jethro Warnett

This paper introduces Distributed Stein Variational Gradient Descent (DSVGD), a non-parametric generalized Bayesian inference framework for federated learning. DSVGD maintains a number of non-random and interacting particles at a central…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Rahif Kassab , Osvaldo Simeone

Ensembles of deep neural networks have achieved great success recently, but they do not offer a proper Bayesian justification. Moreover, while they allow for averaging of predictions over several hypotheses, they do not provide any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Francesco D'Angelo , Vincent Fortuin , Florian Wenzel

Bayesian inference plays an important role in advancing machine learning, but faces computational challenges when applied to complex models such as deep neural networks. Variational inference circumvents these challenges by formulating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-03 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Didrik Nielsen

Several emerging post-Bayesian methods target a probability distribution for which an entropy-regularised variational objective is minimised. This increased flexibility introduces a computational challenge, as one loses access to an…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-17 Clémentine Chazal , Heishiro Kanagawa , Zheyang Shen , Anna Korba , Chris. J. Oates

We propose a new Stein self-repulsive dynamics for obtaining diversified samples from intractable un-normalized distributions. Our idea is to introduce Stein variational gradient as a repulsive force to push the samples of Langevin dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Mao Ye , Tongzheng Ren , Qiang Liu

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Cornelius V. Braun , Robert T. Lange , Marc Toussaint

In recent years, variational quantum algorithms have garnered significant attention as a candidate approach for near-term quantum advantage using noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. In this article we introduce kernel descent,…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-16 Lars Simon , Holger Eble , Manuel Radons

We introduce a new family of particle evolution samplers suitable for constrained domains and non-Euclidean geometries. Stein Variational Mirror Descent and Mirrored Stein Variational Gradient Descent minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-26 Jiaxin Shi , Chang Liu , Lester Mackey

We develop Riemannian Stein Variational Gradient Descent (RSVGD), a Bayesian inference method that generalizes Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to Riemann manifold. The benefits are two-folds: (i) for inference tasks in Euclidean…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-12-01 Chang Liu , Jun Zhu

In this paper, we propose an infinite-dimensional version of the Stein variational gradient descent (iSVGD) method for solving Bayesian inverse problems. The method can generate approximate samples from posteriors efficiently. Based on the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-09 Junxiong Jia , Peijun Li , Deyu Meng

We propose in this work RBM-SVGD, a stochastic version of Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) method for efficiently sampling from a given probability measure and thus useful for Bayesian inference. The method is to apply the Random…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-24 Lei Li , Yingzhou Li , Jian-Guo Liu , Zibu Liu , Jianfeng Lu

Gradient estimation -- approximating the gradient of an expectation with respect to the parameters of a distribution -- is central to the solution of many machine learning problems. However, when the distribution is discrete, most common…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Jiaxin Shi , Yuhao Zhou , Jessica Hwang , Michalis K. Titsias , Lester Mackey

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is a powerful framework for approximating complex posterior distributions, but training with the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence can be challenging due to high variance and bias in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tobias Pielok , Bernd Bischl , David Rügamer

Approximate inference in probability models is a fundamental task in machine learning. Approximate inference provides powerful tools to Bayesian reasoning, decision making, and Bayesian deep learning. The main goal is to estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Jun Han

We introduce Kalman Gradient Descent, a stochastic optimization algorithm that uses Kalman filtering to adaptively reduce gradient variance in stochastic gradient descent by filtering the gradient estimates. We present both a theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 James Vuckovic

Stein discrepancies have emerged as a powerful statistical tool, being applied to fundamental statistical problems including parameter inference, goodness-of-fit testing, and sampling. The canonical Stein discrepancies require the…

Computation · Statistics 2022-07-20 Matthew A Fisher , Chris. J Oates

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular sampling algorithm used in various machine learning tasks. It is well known that SVGD arises from a discretization of the kernelized gradient flow of the Kullback-Leibler divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Lukang Sun , Peter Richtárik

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Ola Rønning , Eric Nalisnick , Christophe Ley , Padhraic Smyth , Thomas Hamelryck

This paper examines the spatial coverage optimization problem for multiple sensors in a known convex environment, where the coverage service of each sensor is heterogeneous and anisotropic. We introduce the Stein Coverage algorithm, a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Donipolo Ghimire , Solmaz S. Kia