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Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Cornelius V. Braun , Robert T. Lange , Marc Toussaint

The curse of dimensionality is a longstanding challenge in Bayesian inference in high dimensions. In this work, we propose a projected Stein variational gradient descent (pSVGD) method to overcome this challenge by exploiting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Peng Chen , Omar Ghattas

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

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

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) refers to a class of methods for Bayesian inference based on interacting particle systems. In this paper, we consider the originally proposed deterministic dynamics as well as a stochastic variant,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-26 Nikolas Nüsken , D. R. Michiel Renger

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 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

In this paper, we propose a novel kernel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for large-scale supervised learning with general losses. Compared to traditional kernel SGD, our algorithm improves efficiency and scalability through an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Jinhui Bai , Andreas Christmann , Lei Shi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-10 Ye He , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Bharath K. Sriperumbudur , Jianfeng Lu

We derive finite-particle rates for the regularized Stein variational gradient descent (R-SVGD) algorithm introduced by He et al. (2024) that corrects the constant-order bias of the SVGD by applying a resolvent-type preconditioner to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Ye He , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Sayan Banerjee , Promit Ghosal

We provide finite-particle convergence rates for the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm in the Kernelized Stein Discrepancy ($\mathsf{KSD}$) and Wasserstein-2 metrics. Our key insight is that the time derivative of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-10 Sayan Banerjee , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Promit Ghosal

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is a powerful framework for approximating complex posterior distributions, but training with the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence can be challenging due to high variance and bias in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tobias Pielok , Bernd Bischl , David Rügamer

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the convergence rates of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm when applied to overparameterized two-layer neural networks. Our approach combines the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-11 Dinghao Cao , Zheng-Chu Guo , Lei Shi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-24 Lei Li , Yingzhou Li , Jian-Guo Liu , Zibu Liu , Jianfeng Lu

We develop Riemannian Stein Variational Gradient Descent (RSVGD), a Bayesian inference method that generalizes Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to Riemann manifold. The benefits are two-folds: (i) for inference tasks in Euclidean…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-12-01 Chang Liu , Jun Zhu

Most scientific machine learning (SciML) applications of neural networks involve hundreds to thousands of parameters, and hence, uncertainty quantification for such models is plagued by the curse of dimensionality. Using physical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Govinda Anantha Padmanabha , Jan Niklas Fuhg , Cosmin Safta , Reese E. Jones , Nikolaos Bouklas

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…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-02-26 Peng Chen , Omar Ghattas

We formalize an equivalence between two popular methods for Bayesian inference: Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and black-box variational inference (BBVI). In particular, we show that BBVI corresponds precisely to SVGD when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Casey Chu , Kentaro Minami , Kenji Fukumizu

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

Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-24 Anna Korba , Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski , Szymon Majewski , Pierre Ablin