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Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Cornelius V. Braun , Robert T. Lange , Marc Toussaint

We study the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm, which optimises a set of particles to approximate a target probability distribution $\pi\propto e^{-V}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. In the population limit, SVGD performs gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-05 Anna Korba , Adil Salim , Michael Arbel , Giulia Luise , Arthur Gretton

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Qingzhong Ai , Shiyu Liu , Lirong He , Zenglin Xu

Stein variational inference (SVI) is a sample-based approximate Bayesian inference technique that generates a sample set by jointly optimizing the samples' locations to minimize an information-theoretic measure of discrepancy with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Liam Pavlovic , David M. Rosen

Rare event simulation and rare event probability estimation are important tasks within the analysis of systems subject to uncertainty and randomness. Simultaneously, accurately estimating rare event probabilities is an inherently difficult…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-07-18 Max Ehre , Iason Papaioannou , Daniel Straub

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Ola Rønning , Eric Nalisnick , Christophe Ley , Padhraic Smyth , Thomas Hamelryck

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) was recently proposed as a general purpose nonparametric variational inference algorithm [Liu & Wang, NIPS 2016]: it minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and its…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-31 Gianluca Detommaso , Tiangang Cui , Alessio Spantini , Youssef Marzouk , Robert Scheichl

We show how to use Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to carry out inference in Gaussian process (GP) models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and large data volumes. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is extremely computationally intensive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-20 Thomas Pinder , Christopher Nemeth , David Leslie

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a nonparametric particle-based deterministic sampling algorithm. Despite its wide usage, understanding the theoretical properties of SVGD has remained a challenging problem. For sampling from a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Tianle Liu , Promit Ghosal , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Natesh S. Pillai

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a deterministic sampling algorithm that iteratively transports a set of particles to approximate given distributions, based on an efficient gradient-based update that guarantees to optimally…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Qiang Liu

Stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is an accelerated version of stochastic gradient descent based on variance reduction, and is promising for solving large-scale inverse problems. In this work, we analyze SVRG and a regularized…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-18 Bangti Jin , Zehui Zhou

Bayesian inference problems require sampling or approximating high-dimensional probability distributions. The focus of this paper is on the recently introduced Stein variational gradient descent methodology, a class of algorithms that rely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 A. Duncan , N. Nuesken , L. Szpruch

We propose a novel particle-based variational inference method designed to work with multimodal distributions. Our approach, referred to as Branched Stein Variational Gradient Descent (BSVGD), extends the classical Stein Variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Isaías Bañales , Arturo Jaramillo , Joshué Helí Ricalde-Guerrero

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) refers to a class of methods for Bayesian inference based on interacting particle systems. In this paper, we consider the originally proposed deterministic dynamics as well as a stochastic variant,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-26 Nikolas Nüsken , D. R. Michiel Renger

Schr\"odinger bridge (SB) has emerged as the go-to method for optimizing transportation plans in diffusion models. However, SB requires estimating the intractable forward score functions, inevitably resulting in the costly implicit training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Wei Deng , Weijian Luo , Yixin Tan , Marin Biloš , Yu Chen , Yuriy Nevmyvaka , Ricky T. Q. Chen

We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-26 Jun Han , Qiang Liu

Policy gradient methods have been successfully applied to many complex reinforcement learning problems. However, policy gradient methods suffer from high variance, slow convergence, and inefficient exploration. In this work, we introduce a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-11 Yang Liu , Prajit Ramachandran , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

Gradient-based approximate inference methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), provide simple and general-purpose inference engines for differentiable continuous distributions. However, existing forms of SVGD cannot be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Jun Han , Fan Ding , Xianglong Liu , Lorenzo Torresani , Jian Peng , Qiang Liu

We provide the first finite-particle convergence rate for Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), a popular algorithm for approximating a probability distribution with a collection of particles. Specifically, whenever the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Jiaxin Shi , Lester Mackey

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a particle-based inference algorithm that leverages gradient information for efficient approximate inference. In this work, we enhance SVGD by leveraging preconditioning matrices, such as the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-06 Dilin Wang , Ziyang Tang , Chandrajit Bajaj , Qiang Liu