Related papers: Stein Variational Adaptive Importance Sampling

It is well-known that the reparameterisation gradient estimator, which exhibits low variance in practice, is biased for non-differentiable models. This may compromise correctness of gradient-based optimisation methods such as stochastic…

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), a popular sampling algorithm, is often described as the kernelized gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler divergence in the geometry of optimal transport. We introduce a new perspective on SVGD…

We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained.…

Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…

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…

Uniform sampling of training data has been commonly used in traditional stochastic optimization algorithms such as Proximal Stochastic Gradient Descent (prox-SGD) and Proximal Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent (prox-SDCA). Although uniform…

Current state-of-the-art optimizers are adaptive gradient-based optimization methods such as Adam. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in formulating gradient-based optimizers in a probabilistic framework for better modeling the…

We introduce a theoretical and practical framework for efficient importance sampling of mini-batch samples for gradient estimation from single and multiple probability distributions. To handle noisy gradients, our framework dynamically…

Importance sampling (IS) represents a fundamental technique for a large surge of off-policy reinforcement learning approaches. Policy gradient (PG) methods, in particular, significantly benefit from IS, enabling the effective reuse of…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…

A crucial task in predictive maintenance is estimating the remaining useful life of physical systems. In the last decade, deep learning has improved considerably upon traditional model-based and statistical approaches in terms of predictive…

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a widely used sampling algorithm that has been successfully applied in several areas of Machine Learning. SVGD operates by iteratively moving a set of interacting particles (which represent the…

Stochastic particle-optimization sampling (SPOS) is a recently-developed scalable Bayesian sampling framework that unifies stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) algorithms based on Wasserstein…

Despite the strong theoretical guarantees that variance-reduced finite-sum optimization algorithms enjoy, their applicability remains limited to cases where the memory overhead they introduce (SAG/SAGA), or the periodic full gradient…

We study online inference and asymptotic covariance estimation for the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm. While classical methods (such as plug-in and batch-means estimators) are available, they either require inaccessible…

In this paper, we propose a stochastic optimization method that adaptively controls the sample size used in the computation of gradient approximations. Unlike other variance reduction techniques that either require additional storage or the…

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…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…

We focus on the problem of efficient sampling and learning of probability densities by incorporating symmetries in probabilistic models. We first introduce Equivariant Stein Variational Gradient Descent algorithm -- an equivariant sampling…

Humans are able to accelerate their learning by selecting training materials that are the most informative and at the appropriate level of difficulty. We propose a framework for distributing deep learning in which one set of workers search…