Related papers: Bayesian posterior approximation via greedy partic…
The Frank-Wolfe algorithm is a popular method in structurally constrained machine learning applications, due to its fast per-iteration complexity. However, one major limitation of the method is a slow rate of convergence that is difficult…
Ensembles of independently trained neural networks are a state-of-the-art approach to estimate predictive uncertainty in Deep Learning, and can be interpreted as an approximation of the posterior distribution via a mixture of delta…
Likelihood-free inference methods typically make use of a distance between simulated and real data. A common example is the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), which has previously been used for approximate Bayesian computation, minimum…
The analysis of Frank Wolfe (FW) variants is often complicated by the presence of different kinds of "good" and "bad" steps. In this article we aim to simplify the convergence analysis of some of these variants by getting rid of such a…
We propose a novel sparse spectrum approximation of Gaussian process (GP) tailored for Bayesian optimization. Whilst the current sparse spectrum methods provide desired approximations for regression problems, it is observed that this…
Decentralized optimization algorithms have received much attention due to the recent advances in network information processing. However, conventional decentralized algorithms based on projected gradient descent are incapable of handling…
Variational inference methods for latent variable statistical models have gained popularity because they are relatively fast, can handle large data sets, and have deterministic convergence guarantees. However, in practice it is unclear…
The approximation of a discrete probability distribution $\mathbf{t}$ by an $M$-type distribution $\mathbf{p}$ is considered. The approximation error is measured by the informational divergence $\mathbb{D}(\mathbf{t}\Vert\mathbf{p})$, which…
We study stochastic projection-free methods for constrained optimization of smooth functions on Riemannian manifolds, i.e., with additional constraints beyond the parameter domain being a manifold. Specifically, we introduce stochastic…
An important task in computational statistics and machine learning is to approximate a posterior distribution $p(x)$ with an empirical measure supported on a set of representative points $\{x_i\}_{i=1}^n$. This paper focuses on methods…
Factors models are routinely used to analyze high-dimensional data in both single-study and multi-study settings. Bayesian inference for such models relies on Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods which scale poorly as the number of…
Gradient-based methods are well-suited for derivative-free optimization (DFO), where finite-difference (FD) estimates are commonly used as gradient surrogates. Traditional stochastic approximation methods, such as Kiefer-Wolfowitz (KW) and…
We study projection-free methods for constrained Riemannian optimization. In particular, we propose the Riemannian Frank-Wolfe (RFW) method. We analyze non-asymptotic convergence rates of RFW to an optimum for (geodesically) convex…
In some misspecified settings, the posterior distribution in Bayesian statistics may lead to inconsistent estimates. To fix this issue, it has been suggested to replace the likelihood by a pseudo-likelihood, that is the exponential of a…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based and non-parametric particle method for sampling from a target distribution, such as in Bayesian inference and other machine learning tasks. Different from other particle methods,…
Memory is a key computational bottleneck when solving large-scale convex optimization problems such as semidefinite programs (SDPs). In this paper, we focus on the regime in which storing an $n\times n$ matrix decision variable is…
We study Frank-Wolfe (FW) methods for constrained bilevel optimization when the lower-level problem is solved only approximately, yielding biased and inexact hypergradients. We analyze inexact variants of vanilla FW as well as away-step and…
In image reconstruction, an accurate quantification of uncertainty is of great importance for informed decision making. Here, the Bayesian approach to inverse problems can be used: the image is represented through a random function that…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the…
Computable Stein discrepancies have been deployed for a variety of applications, ranging from sampler selection in posterior inference to approximate Bayesian inference to goodness-of-fit testing. Existing convergence-determining Stein…