English
Related papers

Related papers: Generalized Gumbel-Softmax Gradient Estimator for …

200 papers

Learning to sample from complex unnormalized distributions is a fundamental challenge in computational physics and machine learning. While score-based and variational methods have achieved success in continuous domains, extending them to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-11 Lei Li , Zhen Wang , Lishuo Zhang

In this paper, we develop efficient randomized algorithms for estimating probabilistic robustness margin and constructing robustness degradation curve for uncertain dynamic systems. One remarkable feature of these algorithms is their…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2008-05-13 Xinjia Chen , Kemin Zhou , Jorge L. Aravena

Diffusion models learn to reverse the progressive noising of a data distribution to create a generative model. However, the desired continuous nature of the noising process can be at odds with discrete data. To deal with this tension…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Griffin Floto , Thorsteinn Jonsson , Mihai Nica , Scott Sanner , Eric Zhengyu Zhu

Latent Gaussian variables have been popularised in probabilistic machine learning. In turn, gradient estimators are the machinery that facilitates gradient-based optimisation for models with latent Gaussian variables. The reparameterisation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Kevin H. Lam , Thang D. Bui , George Deligiannidis , Yee Whye Teh

While stochastic variational inference is relatively well known for scaling inference in Bayesian probabilistic models, related methods also offer ways to circumnavigate the approximation of analytically intractable expectations. The key…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-09-08 David A. Knowles

Computing gradients of an expectation with respect to the distributional parameters of a discrete distribution is a problem arising in many fields of science and engineering. Typically, this problem is tackled using Reinforce, which frames…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-11 Pau Mulet Arabi , Alec Flowers , Lukas Mauch , Fabien Cardinaux

This note explores the applicability of unsupervised machine learning techniques towards hard optimization problems on random inputs. In particular we consider Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) -- a class of neural networks designed to learn…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-08-19 Weichi Yao , Afonso S. Bandeira , Soledad Villar

ReParameterization (RP) Policy Gradient Methods (PGMs) have been widely adopted for continuous control tasks in robotics and computer graphics. However, recent studies have revealed that, when applied to long-term reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Shenao Zhang , Boyi Liu , Zhaoran Wang , Tuo Zhao

Stochastic simulators are ubiquitous in many fields of applied sciences and engineering. In the context of uncertainty quantification and optimization, a large number of simulations is usually necessary, which becomes intractable for…

Computation · Statistics 2022-02-09 X. Zhu , B. Sudret

In a variety of problems originating in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, the loss function is defined by an expectation over a collection of random variables, which might be part of a probabilistic model or the external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-06 John Schulman , Nicolas Heess , Theophane Weber , Pieter Abbeel

We consider the problem of inference in discrete probabilistic models, that is, distributions over subsets of a finite ground set. These encompass a range of well-known models in machine learning, such as determinantal point processes and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Alkis Gotovos , Hamed Hassani , Andreas Krause , Stefanie Jegelka

We present doubly stochastic gradient MCMC, a simple and generic method for (approximate) Bayesian inference of deep generative models (DGMs) in a collapsed continuous parameter space. At each MCMC sampling step, the algorithm randomly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-08 Chao Du , Jun Zhu , Bo Zhang

We study the implicit regularization of gradient descent towards structured sparsity via a novel neural reparameterization, which we call a diagonally grouped linear neural network. We show the following intriguing property of our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Jiangyuan Li , Thanh V. Nguyen , Chinmay Hegde , Raymond K. W. Wong

Stochastic variational Bayes algorithms have become very popular in the machine learning literature, particularly in the context of nonparametric Bayesian inference. These algorithms replace the true but intractable posterior distribution…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-10-04 Pedro Regueiro , Abel Rodríguez , Juan Sosa

How does one generalize differential geometric constructs such as curvature of a manifold to the discrete world of graphs and other combinatorial structures? This problem carries significant importance for analyzing models of discrete…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-06-27 J. F. Du Plessis , Xerxes D. Arsiwalla

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Luca Franceschi , Mathias Niepert , Massimiliano Pontil , Xiao He

Stochastic Galerkin methods offer unexplored potential for the numerical simulation of parabolic problems with random variables, in particular if they are combined with variational discretizations of the space and time variables. Due to the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-21 Moataz Dawor , Nils Margenberg , Markus Bause

Gradient-regularized value learning methods improve sample efficiency by leveraging learned models of transition dynamics and rewards to estimate return gradients. However, existing approaches, such as MAGE, struggle in stochastic or noisy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Baptiste Debes , Tinne Tuytelaars

We study statistical inference and distributionally robust solution methods for stochastic optimization problems, focusing on confidence intervals for optimal values and solutions that achieve exact coverage asymptotically. We develop a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-03 John Duchi , Peter Glynn , Hongseok Namkoong

The simplest and most widely applied method for guaranteeing differential privacy is to add instance-independent noise to a statistic of interest that is scaled to its global sensitivity. However, global sensitivity is a worst-case notion…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-06-10 Mark Bun , Thomas Steinke