Related papers: Bayesian posterior approximation via greedy partic…
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…
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…
Gaussian processes (GPs) offer a flexible class of priors for nonparametric Bayesian regression, but popular GP posterior inference methods are typically prohibitively slow or lack desirable finite-data guarantees on quality. We develop an…
Wasserstein gradient flows are continuous time dynamics that define curves of steepest descent to minimize an objective function over the space of probability measures (i.e., the Wasserstein space). This objective is typically a divergence…
The paper introduces a new adaptive version of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm for relatively smooth convex functions. It is proposed to use the Bregman divergence other than half the square of the Euclidean norm in the formula for step-size.…
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…
We propose a novel particle-based variational inference method designed to work with multimodal distributions. Our approach, referred to as Branched Stein Variational Gradient Descent (BSVGD), extends the classical Stein Variational…
This work presents a multilevel variant of Stein variational gradient descent to more efficiently sample from target distributions. The key ingredient is a sequence of distributions with growing fidelity and costs that converges to the…
In this paper, we study efficient approximate sampling for probability distributions known up to normalization constants. We specifically focus on a problem class arising in Bayesian inference for large-scale inverse problems in science and…
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…
A fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference is efficient representation of a target distribution. Many non-parametric approaches do so by sampling a large number of points using variants of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an…
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…
We propose Frank--Wolfe (FW) algorithms with an adaptive Bregman step-size strategy for smooth adaptable (also called: relatively smooth) (weakly-) convex functions. This means that the gradient of the objective function is not necessarily…
Bayesian inference has many advantages for complex models, but standard Monte Carlo methods for summarizing the posterior can be computationally demanding, and it is attractive to consider optimization-based variational methods. Our work…
The digital telecommunications receiver is an important context for inference methodology, the key objective being to minimize the expected loss function in recovering the transmitted information. For that criterion, the optimal decision is…
Deep feedforward neural networks (DFNNs) are a powerful tool for functional approximation. We describe flexible versions of generalized linear and generalized linear mixed models incorporating basis functions formed by a DFNN. The…
We propose in this work RBM-SVGD, a stochastic version of Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) method for efficiently sampling from a given probability measure and thus useful for Bayesian inference. The method is to apply the Random…
Variational methods are attractive for computing Bayesian inference for highly parametrized models and large datasets where exact inference is impractical. They approximate a target distribution - either the posterior or an augmented…
We study the convergence properties of the original and away-step Frank-Wolfe algorithms for linearly constrained stochastic optimization assuming the availability of unbiased objective function gradient estimates. The objective function is…
The Frank-Wolfe (FW) optimization algorithm has lately re-gained popularity thanks in particular to its ability to nicely handle the structured constraints appearing in machine learning applications. However, its convergence rate is known…