Related papers: Stein Variational Adaptive Importance Sampling
We obtain an improved finite-sample guarantee on the linear convergence of stochastic gradient descent for smooth and strongly convex objectives, improving from a quadratic dependence on the conditioning $(L/\mu)^2$ (where $L$ is a bound on…
We introduce $\textit{Stein transport}$, a novel methodology for Bayesian inference designed to efficiently push an ensemble of particles along a predefined curve of tempered probability distributions. The driving vector field is chosen…
The variance reduction established by importance sampling strongly depends on the choice of the importance sampling distribution. A good choice is often hard to achieve especially for high-dimensional integration problems. Nonparametric…
Computing the exact likelihood of data in large Bayesian networks consisting of thousands of vertices is often a difficult task. When these models contain many deterministic conditional probability tables and when the observed values are…
Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…
We consider a variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a random learning rate and reveal its convergence properties. SGD is a widely used stochastic optimization algorithm in machine learning, especially deep learning. Numerous…
Importance sampling (IS) is an efficient stand-in for model refitting in performing (LOO) cross-validation (CV) on a Bayesian model. IS inverts the Bayesian update for a single observation by reweighting posterior samples. The so-called…
We introduce adaptive sampling methods for stochastic programs with deterministic constraints. First, we propose and analyze a variant of the stochastic projected gradient method where the sample size used to approximate the reduced…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variations have been effectively used to optimize neural network models. However, with the rapid growth of big data and deep learning, SGD is no longer the most suitable choice due to its…
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…
Adaptive importance sampling (AIS) algorithms are widely used to approximate expectations with respect to complicated target probability distributions. When the target has heavy tails, existing AIS algorithms can provide inconsistent…
Stochastic gradient descent updates parameters with summation gradient computed from a random data batch. This summation will lead to unbalanced training process if the data we obtained is unbalanced. To address this issue, this paper takes…
We consider the setting where a master wants to run a distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm on $n$ workers, each having a subset of the data. Distributed SGD may suffer from the effect of stragglers, i.e., slow or…
Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a simple and efficient way to solve a broad range of machine learning problems. Here, we focus on distribution regression (DR), involving two stages of sampling: Firstly, we regress from…
We introduce a hybrid stochastic estimator to design stochastic gradient algorithms for solving stochastic optimization problems. Such a hybrid estimator is a convex combination of two existing biased and unbiased estimators and leads to…
We propose an adaptively weighted stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics algorithm (SGLD), so-called contour stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (CSGLD), for Bayesian learning in big data statistics. The proposed algorithm is essentially a…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…
This paper introduces a method for Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control that optimizes sample generation towards an optimal trajectory through Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD). MPPI relies upon predictive rollout of…