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Related papers: Stein Variational Adaptive Importance Sampling

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Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) refers to a class of methods for Bayesian inference based on interacting particle systems. In this paper, we consider the originally proposed deterministic dynamics as well as a stochastic variant,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-26 Nikolas Nüsken , D. R. Michiel Renger

We provide the first finite-particle convergence rate for Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), a popular algorithm for approximating a probability distribution with a collection of particles. Specifically, whenever the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Jiaxin Shi , Lester Mackey

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a widely used in practice algorithm for scalable sampling with deterministic particle updates. We study its behavior in the singular limit where the kernel bandwidth tends to zero. In this…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-05-06 José A. Carrillo , Jakub Skrzeczkowski , Jethro Warnett

We show how to use Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to carry out inference in Gaussian process (GP) models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and large data volumes. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is extremely computationally intensive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-20 Thomas Pinder , Christopher Nemeth , David Leslie

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a recently proposed particle-based Bayesian inference method, which has attracted a lot of interest due to its remarkable approximation ability and particle efficiency compared to traditional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-11 Jingwei Zhuo , Chang Liu , Jiaxin Shi , Jun Zhu , Ning Chen , Bo Zhang

The Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm is a deterministic particle method for sampling. However, a mean-field analysis reveals that the gradient flow corresponding to the SVGD algorithm (i.e., the Stein Variational Gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-10 Ye He , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Bharath K. Sriperumbudur , Jianfeng Lu

Bayesian inference problems require sampling or approximating high-dimensional probability distributions. The focus of this paper is on the recently introduced Stein variational gradient descent methodology, a class of algorithms that rely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 A. Duncan , N. Nuesken , L. Szpruch

Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-13 Joseph Sakaya , Arto Klami

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

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

Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo methodology that allows for approximation of a target distribution using weighted samples generated from another proposal distribution. Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) implements an iterative…

Computation · Statistics 2018-06-04 Yousef El-Laham , Victor Elvira , Monica F. Bugallo

Variance reduction (VR) techniques for convergence rate acceleration of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm have been developed with great efforts recently. VR's two variants, stochastic variance-reduced-gradient (SVRG-SGD) and…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-04-11 Fei Wang , Jun Ye , Weichen Li , Guihai Chen

Inspired by dynamic programming, we propose Stochastic Virtual Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm where the Virtual Gradient is defined by computational graph and automatic differentiation. The method is computationally efficient and has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-01 Zheng Li , Shi Shu

We propose a simple algorithm to train stochastic neural networks to draw samples from given target distributions for probabilistic inference. Our method is based on iteratively adjusting the neural network parameters so that the output…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-01 Yihao Feng , Dilin Wang , Qiang Liu

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-12 Stephan Mandt , Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

Stochastic gradient algorithms are the main focus of large-scale optimization problems and led to important successes in the recent advancement of the deep learning algorithms. The convergence of SGD depends on the careful choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Caglar Gulcehre , Jose Sotelo , Marcin Moczulski , Yoshua Bengio

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

Particle based optimization algorithms have recently been developed as sampling methods that iteratively update a set of particles to approximate a target distribution. In particular Stein variational gradient descent has gained attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Francesco D'Angelo , Vincent Fortuin

Rare event simulation and rare event probability estimation are important tasks within the analysis of systems subject to uncertainty and randomness. Simultaneously, accurately estimating rare event probabilities is an inherently difficult…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-18 Max Ehre , Iason Papaioannou , Daniel Straub

We propose an adaptive importance sampling scheme for Gaussian approximations of intractable posteriors. Optimization-based approximations like variational inference can be too inaccurate while existing Monte Carlo methods can be too slow.…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-04 Willem van den Boom , Andrea Cremaschi , Alexandre H. Thiery