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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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-23 Stephan Mandt , Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

We study a variation of vanilla stochastic gradient descent where the optimizer only has access to a Markovian sampling scheme. These schemes encompass applications that range from decentralized optimization with a random walker (token…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-26 Mathieu Even

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is an important alternative to the Langevin-type algorithms for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi(x) \propto \exp(-V(x))$. In the existing theory of Langevin-type algorithms…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-02 Lukang Sun , Avetik Karagulyan , Peter Richtarik

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for minimizing objective functions that arise in machine learning. For constant step-sized SGD, the iterates form a Markov chain on a general state space. Focusing on a class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-26 David Shirokoff , Philip Zaleski

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a general-purpose optimization-based sampling algorithm that has recently exploded in popularity, but is limited by two issues: it is known to produce biased samples, and it can be slow to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-20 Alex Leviyev , Joshua Chen , Yifei Wang , Omar Ghattas , Aaron Zimmerman

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 popular particle-based method for Bayesian inference. However, its convergence suffers from the variance collapse, which reduces the accuracy and diversity of the estimation. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Jiankui Zhou , Yue Qiu

Stochastic gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (SGMCMC) is considered the gold standard for Bayesian inference in large-scale models, such as Bayesian neural networks. Since practitioners face speed versus accuracy tradeoffs in these models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Antonios Alexos , Alex Boyd , Stephan Mandt

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 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

Decentralized coordination for multi-robot systems involves planning in challenging, high-dimensional spaces. The planning problem is particularly challenging in the presence of obstacles and different sources of uncertainty such as…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Jana Pavlasek , Joshua Jing Zhi Mah , Ruihan Xu , Odest Chadwicke Jenkins , Fabio Ramos

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is an algorithm for sampling from a target density which is known up to a multiplicative constant. Although SVGD is a popular algorithm in practice, its theoretical study is limited to a few recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Adil Salim , Lukang Sun , Peter Richtárik

One of the most common methods to train machine learning algorithms today is the stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In a distributed setting, SGD-based algorithms have been shown to converge theoretically under specific circumstances. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Soumya Sarkar , Shweta Jain

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 Stein variational gradient descent method to concurrently sparsify, train, and provide uncertainty quantification of a complexly parameterized model such as a neural network. It employs a graph reconciliation and condensation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Govinda Anantha Padmanabha , Cosmin Safta , Nikolaos Bouklas , Reese E. Jones

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

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

Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) has been increasingly popular in Bayesian learning due to its ability to deal with large data. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples from a discretized-time Markov chain to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-30 Changyou Chen , Ruiyi Zhang

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