Related papers: A Unified Particle-Optimization Framework for Scal…
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…
Approximate Bayesian inference estimates descriptors of an intractable target distribution - in essence, an optimization problem within a family of distributions. For example, Langevin dynamics (LD) extracts asymptotically exact samples…
In this paper we propose and analyze a novel multilevel version of Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). SVGD is a recent particle based variational inference method. For Bayesian inverse problems with computationally expensive…
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…
In this work, we propose a Bayesian type sparse deep learning algorithm. The algorithm utilizes a set of spike-and-slab priors for the parameters in the deep neural network. The hierarchical Bayesian mixture will be trained using an…
Wasserstein barycenters provide a principled approach for aggregating probability measures, while preserving the geometry of their ambient space. Existing discrete methods are not scalable as they assume access to the complete set of…
We address the optimization problem of simultaneously minimizing multiple objective functionals over a family of probability distributions. This type of Multi-Objective Distributional Optimization commonly arises in machine learning and…
We propose a mathematically principled PDE gradient flow framework for distributionally robust optimization (DRO). Exploiting the recent advances in the intersection of Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling and gradient flow theory, we show…
Bayesian approaches have been successfully integrated into training deep neural networks. One popular family is stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo methods (SG-MCMC), which have gained increasing interest due to their scalability…
Stream stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and efficient method for solving online optimization problems in operations research (OR), where data is generated by parameter-dependent Markov chains. Unlike traditional approaches…
Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) has emerged as a key MCMC algorithm for Bayesian learning from large scale datasets. While SGLD with decreasing step sizes converges weakly to the posterior distribution, the algorithm is often…
The Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm is a deterministic particle method for sampling. However, a mean-field analysis reveals that the gradient flow corresponding to the SVGD algorithm (i.e., the Stein Variational Gradient…
Stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) methods are Bayesian analogs to popular stochastic optimization methods; however, this connection is not well studied. We explore this relationship by applying simulated annealing to an…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a nonparametric particle-based deterministic sampling algorithm. Despite its wide usage, understanding the theoretical properties of SVGD has remained a challenging problem. For sampling from a…
As an important Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) algorithm has achieved great success in Bayesian learning and posterior sampling. However, SGLD typically suffers from slow convergence…
Sequential state estimation in non-linear and non-Gaussian state spaces has a wide range of applications in statistics and signal processing. One of the most effective non-linear filtering approaches, particle filtering, suffers from weight…
We propose a stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (SG-MCMC) algorithm for scalable inference in mixed-membership stochastic blockmodels (MMSB). Our algorithm is based on the stochastic gradient Riemannian Langevin sampler and…
We consider the problem of sampling from a distribution governed by a potential function. This work proposes an explicit score based MCMC method that is deterministic, resulting in a deterministic evolution for particles rather than a…
We present a new particle filtering algorithm for nonlinear systems in the discrete-time setting. Our algorithm is based on the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) framework, which is a general approach to sample from a target…
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…