Related papers: Scalable Thompson Sampling via Optimal Transport
Sampling from the posterior is a key technical problem in Bayesian statistics. Rigorous guarantees are difficult to obtain for Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms of common use. In this paper, we study an alternative class of algorithms…
Bayesian optimization devolves the global optimization of a costly objective function to the global optimization of a sequence of acquisition functions. This inner-loop optimization can be catastrophically difficult if it involves posterior…
Optimal transport (OT) provides effective tools for comparing and mapping probability measures. We propose to leverage the flexibility of neural networks to learn an approximate optimal transport map. More precisely, we present a new and…
Approximate inference in probability models is a fundamental task in machine learning. Approximate inference provides powerful tools to Bayesian reasoning, decision making, and Bayesian deep learning. The main goal is to estimate the…
This paper investigates the problem of tracking solutions of stochastic optimization problems with time-varying costs that depend on random variables with decision-dependent distributions. In this context, we propose the use of an online…
We propose a sampling-based framework for finite-horizon trajectory and policy optimization under differentiable dynamics by casting controller design as inference. Specifically, we minimize a KL-regularized expected trajectory cost, which…
We investigate a simple approximation scheme, based on overlapping linear decision rules, for solving data-driven two-stage distributionally robust optimization problems with the type-$\infty$ Wasserstein ambiguity set. Our main result…
Optimal transport (OT) defines a powerful framework to compare probability distributions in a geometrically faithful way. However, the practical impact of OT is still limited because of its computational burden. We propose a new class of…
Stochastic gradients have been widely integrated into Langevin-based methods to improve their scalability and efficiency in solving large-scale sampling problems. However, the proximal sampler, which exhibits much faster convergence than…
Distributionally-robust optimization is often studied for a fixed set of distributions rather than time-varying distributions that can drift significantly over time (which is, for instance, the case in finance and sociology due to…
We study the problem of estimating a sequence of evolving probability distributions from historical data, where the underlying distribution changes over time in a nonstationary and nonparametric manner. To capture gradual changes, we…
Model comparison for the purposes of selection, averaging and validation is a problem found throughout statistics. Within the Bayesian paradigm, these problems all require the calculation of the posterior probabilities of models within a…
For massive data, the family of subsampling algorithms is popular to downsize the data volume and reduce computational burden. Existing studies focus on approximating the ordinary least squares estimate in linear regression, where…
We propose a new framework for efficiently sampling from complex probability distributions using a combination of normalizing flows and elliptical slice sampling (Murray et al., 2010). The central idea is to learn a diffeomorphism, through…
The long runtime associated with simulating multidisciplinary systems challenges the use of Bayesian optimization for multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO). This is particularly the case if the coupled system is modeled in a…
We consider the problem of statistical inference when the data is collected via a Thompson Sampling-type algorithm. While Thompson Sampling (TS) is known to be both asymptotically optimal and empirically effective, its adaptive sampling…
Optimal Transport (OT) naturally arises in many machine learning applications, yet the heavy computational burden limits its wide-spread uses. To address the scalability issue, we propose an implicit generative learning-based framework…
In this paper, we present a flow-based method for global optimization of continuous Sobolev functions, called Stein Boltzmann Sampling (SBS). SBS initializes uniformly a number of particles representing candidate solutions, then uses the…
Particle-optimization-based sampling (POS) is a recently developed effective sampling technique that interactively updates a set of particles. A representative algorithm is the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD). We prove, under…
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…