Related papers: Low-variance Black-box Gradient Estimates for the …
Building upon recent developments of force-based estimators with a reduced variance for the computation of densities, radial distribution functions or local transport properties from molecular simulations, we show that the variance can be…
Score-based models, trained with denoising score matching, are remarkably effective in generating high dimensional data. However, the high variance of their training objective hinders optimisation. We attempt to reduce it with a control…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
This paper studies a distributed policy gradient in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents over a communication network aim to find the optimal policy to maximize the average of all agents' local returns. Due…
Stochastic gradient MCMC (SGMCMC) offers a scalable alternative to traditional MCMC, by constructing an unbiased estimate of the gradient of the log-posterior with a small, uniformly-weighted subsample of the data. While efficient to…
While much work on deep latent variable models of text uses continuous latent variables, discrete latent variables are interesting because they are more interpretable and typically more space efficient. We consider several approaches to…
Recent variational inference methods use stochastic gradient estimators whose variance is not well understood. Theoretical guarantees for these estimators are important to understand when these methods will or will not work. This paper…
We propose a novel method for gradient-based optimization of black-box simulators using differentiable local surrogate models. In fields such as physics and engineering, many processes are modeled with non-differentiable simulators with…
ListNet is a well-known listwise learning to rank model and has gained much attention in recent years. A particular problem of ListNet, however, is the high computation complexity in model training, mainly due to the large number of object…
Variational inference in Bayesian deep learning often involves computing the gradient of an expectation that lacks a closed-form solution. In these cases, pathwise and score-function gradient estimators are the most common approaches. The…
Variance reduction techniques have been shown by others in the past to be a useful tool to reduce variance in Simulation studies. However, their application and success in the past has been mainly domain specific, with relatively little…
Many problems in machine learning are naturally expressed in the language of undirected graphical models. Here, we propose black-box learning and inference algorithms for undirected models that optimize a variational approximation to the…
We present a latent variable model for classification that provides a novel probabilistic interpretation of neural network softmax classifiers. We derive a variational objective to train the model, analogous to the evidence lower bound…
The finite symmetric group S_n provides a natural domain for permutations, yet learning probability distributions on S_n is challenging due to its factorially growing size and discrete, non-Euclidean structure. Recent permutation diffusion…
This paper deals with the black-box optimization problem. In this setup, we do not have access to the gradient of the objective function, therefore, we need to estimate it somehow. We propose a new type of approximation JAGUAR, that…
Standard approaches to stochastic gradient estimation, with only noisy black-box function evaluations, use the finite-difference method or its variants. While natural, it is open to our knowledge whether their statistical accuracy is the…
Variational inference is increasingly being addressed with stochastic optimization. In this setting, the gradient's variance plays a crucial role in the optimization procedure, since high variance gradients lead to poor convergence. A…
The radiative transfer equation models various physical processes ranging from plasma simulations to radiation therapy. In practice, these phenomena are often subject to uncertainties. Modeling and propagating these uncertainties requires…
Training neural network models with discrete (categorical or structured) latent variables can be computationally challenging, due to the need for marginalization over large or combinatorial sets. To circumvent this issue, one typically…
Flexible variational distributions improve variational inference but are harder to optimize. In this work we present a control variate that is applicable for any reparameterizable distribution with known mean and covariance matrix, e.g.…