Related papers: Improving Sampling Accuracy of Stochastic Gradient…

Many machine learning problems involve Monte Carlo gradient estimators. As a prominent example, we focus on Monte Carlo variational inference (MCVI) in this paper. The performance of MCVI crucially depends on the variance of its stochastic…

The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…

Standard MCMC methods can scale poorly to big data settings due to the need to evaluate the likelihood at each iteration. There have been a number of approximate MCMC algorithms that use sub-sampling ideas to reduce this computational…

Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) is an approach for computing ground-state wavefunctions that has recently become more powerful due to the introduction of neural network-based wavefunction parametrizations. However, efficiently training neural…

Objective: Surface electromyogram (EMG) signals have typically been assumed to follow a Gaussian distribution. However, the presence of non-Gaussian signals associated with muscle activity has been reported in recent studies, and there is…

Sampling from an unnormalized target distribution is an essential problem with many applications in probabilistic inference. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful method that iteratively updates a set of…

Elliptical slice sampling is a widely used gradient-free Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm that is tuning-free and capable of adapting to local characteristics of the target distribution. However, its primary limitation is that sampling…

In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…

The Stochastic Extragradient (SEG) method is one of the most popular algorithms for solving min-max optimization and variational inequalities problems (VIP) appearing in various machine learning tasks. However, several important questions…

Stochastic sampling methods are arguably the most direct and least intrusive means of incorporating parametric uncertainty into numerical simulations of partial differential equations with random inputs. However, to achieve an overall error…

Model stealing (MS) involves querying and observing the output of a machine learning model to steal its capabilities. The quality of queried data is crucial, yet obtaining a large amount of real data for MS is often challenging. Recent…

We develop a framework that allows the use of the multi-level Monte Carlo (MLMC) methodology (Giles2015) to calculate expectations with respect to the invariant measure of an ergodic SDE. In that context, we study the (over-damped) Langevin…

Many recent Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers leverage continuous dynamics to define a transition kernel that efficiently explores a target distribution. In tandem, a focus has been on devising scalable variants that subsample the…

Gradient sampling (GS) has proved to be an effective methodology for the minimization of objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The most computationally expensive component of a contemporary GS method is the need to…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods offer a principled approach to Bayesian uncertainty quantification but are traditionally limited by the need for full-batch gradient evaluations. We introduce a scalable variant by incorporating…

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based and non-parametric particle method for sampling from a target distribution, such as in Bayesian inference and other machine learning tasks. Different from other particle methods,…

In this paper we propose a novel and practical variance reduction approach for additive functionals of dependent sequences. Our approach combines the use of control variates with the minimisation of an empirical variance estimate. We…

Recent variational Bayes methods for geospatial regression, proposed as an alternative to computationally expensive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling, have leveraged Nearest Neighbor Gaussian processes (NNGP) to achieve scalability.…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are a powerful but computationally expensive way of performing non-parametric Bayesian inference. MCMC proposals which utilise gradients, such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), can better explore the…

The resolution of many large-scale inverse problems using MCMC methods requires a step of drawing samples from a high dimensional Gaussian distribution. While direct Gaussian sampling techniques, such as those based on Cholesky…