English
Related papers

Related papers: Stein Variational Gradient Descent: A General Purp…

200 papers

We consider the optimization problem of minimizing a functional defined over a family of probability distributions, where the objective functional is assumed to possess a variational form. Such a distributional optimization problem arises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Zhuoran Yang , Yufeng Zhang , Yongxin Chen , Zhaoran Wang

We are interested in gradient-based Explicit Generative Modeling where samples can be derived from iterative gradient updates based on an estimate of the score function of the data distribution. Recent advances in Stochastic Gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-08 Wei-Cheng Chang , Chun-Liang Li , Youssef Mroueh , Yiming Yang

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular variational inference algorithm which simulates an interacting particle system to approximately sample from a target distribution, with impressive empirical performance across various…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-09 Aniket Das , Dheeraj Nagaraj

Many particle-based Bayesian inference methods use a single global step size for all parts of the update. In Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), however, each update combines two qualitatively different effects: attraction toward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Arash Sarshar

Traditional preamble detection algorithms have low accuracy in the grant-based random access scheme in massive machine-type communication (mMTC). We present a novel preamble detection algorithm based on Stein variational gradient descent…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-12 Xin Zhu , Hongyi Pan , Salih Atici , Ahmet Enis Cetin

Sampling from an unnormalized target distribution is an essential problem with many applications in probabilistic inference. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful method that iteratively updates a set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Hoang Phan , Ngoc Tran , Trung Le , Toan Tran , Nhat Ho , Dinh Phung

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a deterministic particle inference algorithm that provides an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. However, SVGD has been found to suffer from variance underestimation when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-14 Xing Liu , Harrison Zhu , Jean-François Ton , George Wynne , Andrew Duncan

Stein variational gradient decent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful approximate inference algorithm for complex distributions. However, the standard SVGD requires calculating the gradient of the target density and cannot be applied…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-08 Jun Han , Qiang Liu

Bayesian inference for doubly intractable distributions is challenging because they include intractable terms, which are functions of parameters of interest. Although several alternatives have been developed for such models, they are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-08 Heesang Lee , Songhee Kim , Bokgyeong Kang , Jaewoo Park

This paper proposes a novel parameter selection strategy for kernel-based gradient descent (KGD) algorithms, integrating bias-variance analysis with the splitting method. We introduce the concept of empirical effective dimension to quantify…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-05 Xiaotong Liu , Yunwen Lei , Xiangyu Chang , Shao-Bo Lin

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a deterministic interacting-particle method for sampling from a target probability measure given access to its score function. In the mean-field and continuous-time limit, it is known that the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Lénaïc Chizat , Maria Colombo , Roberto Colombo , Xavier Fernández-Real

We present a new class of gradient-type optimization methods that extends vanilla gradient descent, mirror descent, Riemannian gradient descent, and natural gradient descent. Our approach involves constructing a surrogate for the objective…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-13 Flavien Léger , Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski

We develop a multidimensional Stein methodology for non-degenerate self-decomposable random vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$ having finite first moment. Building on previous univariate findings, we solve an integro-partial differential Stein…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-04-08 Benjamin Arras , Christian Houdré

We introduce a scheme for probabilistic hypocenter inversion with Stein variational inference. Our approach uses a differentiable forward model in the form of a physics informed neural network, which we train to solve the Eikonal equation.…

Geophysics · Physics 2022-08-18 Jonathan D. Smith , Zachary E. Ross , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Jack B. Muir

We propose and analyze a Stein variational reduced basis method (SVRB) to solve large-scale PDE-constrained Bayesian inverse problems. To address the computational challenge of drawing numerous samples requiring expensive PDE solves from…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-02-26 Peng Chen , Omar Ghattas

Combinatorial black-box optimization in high-dimensional settings demands a careful trade-off between exploiting promising regions of the search space and preserving sufficient exploration to identify multiple optima. Although…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Thomas Landais , Olivier Goudet , Adrien Goëffon , Frédéric Saubion , Sylvain Lamprier

In this paper, we present a flow-based method for global optimization of continuous Sobolev functions, called Stein Boltzmann Sampling (SBS). SBS initializes uniformly a number of particles representing candidate solutions, then uses the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-21 Gaëtan Serré , Argyris Kalogeratos , Nicolas Vayatis

Inference is the task of drawing conclusions about unobserved variables given observations of related variables. Applications range from identifying diseases from symptoms to classifying economic regimes from price movements. Unfortunately,…

The Cartesian reverse derivative is a categorical generalization of reverse-mode automatic differentiation. We use this operator to generalize several optimization algorithms, including a straightforward generalization of gradient descent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-22 Dan Shiebler

When maximum likelihood estimation is infeasible, one often turns to score matching, contrastive divergence, or minimum probability flow to obtain tractable parameter estimates. We provide a unifying perspective of these techniques as…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-10-07 Alessandro Barp , Francois-Xavier Briol , Andrew B. Duncan , Mark Girolami , Lester Mackey