Related papers: Understanding MCMC Dynamics as Flows on the Wasser…
It is known that gradient-based MCMC samplers for continuous spaces, such as Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC), can be derived as particle versions of a gradient flow that minimizes KL divergence on a Wasserstein manifold. The superior efficiency…
Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) update the particles based on the kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. However, the design of…
The mean field variational inference (MFVI) formulation restricts the general Bayesian inference problem to the subspace of product measures. We present a framework to analyze MFVI algorithms, which is inspired by a similar development for…
The mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) minimizes an entropy-regularized nonlinear convex functional on the Wasserstein space over $\mathbb{R}^d$, and has gained attention recently as a model for the gradient descent dynamics of interacting…
Recently, optimization on the Riemannian manifold have provided valuable insights to the optimization community. In this regard, extending these methods to to the Wasserstein space is of particular interest, since optimization on…
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…
Particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) have gained attention in the Bayesian inference literature, for their capacity to yield flexible and accurate approximations. We explore ParVIs from the perspective of Wasserstein…
We introduce and study the class of totally dissipative multivalued probability vector fields (MPVF) $\boldsymbol{\mathrm F}$ on the Wasserstein space $(\mathcal{P}_2(\mathsf{X}),W_2)$ of Euclidean or Hilbertian probability measures. We…
Langevin MCMC gradient optimization is a class of increasingly popular methods for estimating a posterior distribution. This paper addresses the algorithm as applied in a decentralized setting, wherein data is distributed across a network…
Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…
Two popular classes of methods for approximate inference are Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference. MCMC tends to be accurate if run for a long enough time, while variational inference tends to give better approximations…
There has been recent interest in developing scalable Bayesian sampling methods such as stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) for big-data analysis. A standard SG-MCMC algorithm simulates samples…
We develop a theory of finite-dimensional polyhedral subsets over the Wasserstein space and optimization of functionals over them via first-order methods. Our main application is to the problem of mean-field variational inference, which…
Recently, through a unified gradient flow perspective of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), particle-based variational inference methods (ParVIs) have been proposed that tend to combine the best of both worlds.…
Variational inference, such as the mean-field (MF) approximation, requires certain conjugacy structures for efficient computation. These can impose unnecessary restrictions on the viable prior distribution family and further constraints on…
We study the underdamped Langevin diffusion when the log of the target distribution is smooth and strongly concave. We present a MCMC algorithm based on its discretization and show that it achieves $\varepsilon$ error (in 2-Wasserstein…
The efficiency of a Markov sampler based on the underdamped Langevin diffusion is studied for high dimensional targets with convex and smooth potentials. We consider a classical second-order integrator which requires only one gradient…
In this study, we introduce novel methodologies designed to adapt original data in response to the dynamics of persistence diagrams along Wasserstein gradient flows. Our research focuses on the development of algorithms that translate…
The gradient flow of the Canham-Helfrich functional is tackled via the Generalized Minimizing Movements approach. We prove the existence of solutions in Wasserstein spaces of varifolds, as well as upper and lower diameter bounds. In the…
In this paper, we study the stochastic Hamiltonian flow in Wasserstein manifold, the probability density space equipped with $L^2$-Wasserstein metric tensor, via the Wong--Zakai approximation. We begin our investigation by showing that the…