Related papers: Refined $\alpha$-Divergence Variational Inference …
Variational inference consists in finding the best approximation of a target distribution within a certain family, where `best' means (typically) smallest Kullback-Leiber divergence. We show that, when the approximation family is…
In this paper, we introduce a novel family of iterative algorithms which carry out $\alpha$-divergence minimisation in a Variational Inference context. They do so by ensuring a systematic decrease at each step in the $\alpha$-divergence…
With the rising number of machine learning competitions, the world has witnessed an exciting race for the best algorithms. However, the involved data selection process may fundamentally suffer from evidence ambiguity and concept drift…
A key design constraint when implementing Monte Carlo and variational inference algorithms is that it must be possible to cheaply and exactly evaluate the marginal densities of proposal distributions and variational families. This takes…
Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…
Variational inference is a scalable technique for approximate Bayesian inference. Deriving variational inference algorithms requires tedious model-specific calculations; this makes it difficult to automate. We propose an automatic…
In this work, we develop a novel Bayesian estimation method for the Dirichlet process (DP) mixture of the inverted Dirichlet distributions, which has been shown to be very flexible for modeling vectors with positive elements. The recently…
This dissertation investigates relative entropies, also called generalized divergences, and how they can be used to characterize information-theoretic tasks in quantum information theory. The main goal is to further refine characterizations…
This paper analyzes reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the average-reward criterion. We focus on Q-learning algorithms based on relative value iteration (RVI), which are model-free stochastic…
We propose new nonparametric accordance R\'enyi-$\alpha$ and $\alpha$-Tsallis divergence estimators for continuous distributions. We discuss this approach with a view to the selection model (on al\'etoire and autoregressive AR (1)). We…
Channel simulation is to simulate a noisy channel using noiseless channels with unlimited shared randomness. This can be interpreted as the reverse problem to Shannon's noisy coding theorem. In contrast to previous works, our approach…
Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) employs a variant of a link-tracing network sampling strategy to collect data from hard-to-reach populations. By tracing the links in the underlying social network, the process exploits the social structure…
We develop a divergence-minimization (DM) framework for robust and efficient inference in latent-mixture models. By optimizing a residual-adjusted divergence, the DM approach recovers EM as a special case and yields robust alternatives…
Neural networks are popular state-of-the-art models for many different tasks.They are often trained via back-propagation to find a value of the weights that correctly predicts the observed data. Although back-propagation has shown good…
Variance estimation is a fundamental problem in statistical modeling. In ultrahigh dimensional linear regressions where the dimensionality is much larger than sample size, traditional variance estimation techniques are not applicable.…
We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy is trained on a source domain and deployed to a distinct target domain. We aim to solve this problem via online distributionally robust Markov decision processes (DRMDPs),…
We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision processes with unknown transition kernels, where the goal is to optimize the total reward under the risk measure of exponential utility. We propose two provably…
Although the diffusion model has achieved remarkable performance in the field of image generation, its high inference delay hinders its wide application in edge devices with scarce computing resources. Therefore, many training-free sampling…
Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS) is a chain-referral design used for collecting data from hidden or hard-to-reach populations through their social networks. In RDS, respondents recruit their peers from the population of interest. As such,…
The Robust Regularized Markov Decision Process (RRMDP) is proposed to learn policies robust to dynamics shifts by adding regularization to the transition dynamics in the value function. Existing methods mostly use unstructured…