Related papers: The equivalence between Stein variational gradient…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) is a powerful framework for approximating complex posterior distributions, but training with the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence can be challenging due to high variance and bias in…

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Variational inference (VI) can be cast as an optimization problem in which the variational parameters are tuned to closely align a variational distribution with the true posterior. The optimization task can be approached through vanilla…

In this paper, we propose an infinite-dimensional version of the Stein variational gradient descent (iSVGD) method for solving Bayesian inverse problems. The method can generate approximate samples from posteriors efficiently. Based on the…

We propose in this work RBM-SVGD, a stochastic version of Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) method for efficiently sampling from a given probability measure and thus useful for Bayesian inference. The method is to apply the Random…

The Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm is a deterministic particle method for sampling. However, a mean-field analysis reveals that the gradient flow corresponding to the SVGD algorithm (i.e., the Stein Variational Gradient…

We introduce $\textit{Stein transport}$, a novel methodology for Bayesian inference designed to efficiently push an ensemble of particles along a predefined curve of tempered probability distributions. The driving vector field is chosen…

Black-Box Variational Inference (BBVI) typically relies on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to optimize the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). However, the stochastic gradients in BBVI inherently exhibit unbounded variance, violating standard…

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a recently proposed particle-based Bayesian inference method, which has attracted a lot of interest due to its remarkable approximation ability and particle efficiency compared to traditional…

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…

We develop EigenVI, an eigenvalue-based approach for black-box variational inference (BBVI). EigenVI constructs its variational approximations from orthogonal function expansions. For distributions over $\mathbb{R}^D$, the lowest order term…

Recent research shows that the dynamics of an infinitely wide neural network (NN) trained by gradient descent can be characterized by Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) \citep{jacot2018neural}. Under the squared loss, the infinite-width NN trained…

The Stein Variational Gradient Descent method is a variational inference method in statistics that has recently received a lot of attention. The method provides a deterministic approximation of the target distribution, by introducing a…

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…

Semi-implicit variational inference (SIVI) extends traditional variational families with semi-implicit distributions defined in a hierarchical manner. Due to the intractable densities of semi-implicit distributions, classical SIVI often…

The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the…

Distributed Stein Variational Gradient Descent (DSVGD) is a non-parametric distributed learning framework for federated Bayesian learning, where multiple clients jointly train a machine learning model by communicating a number of non-random…

The mean field variational inference (MFVI) formulation restricts the general Bayesian inference problem to the subspace of product measures. We present a framework to analyze MFVI algorithms, which is inspired by a similar development for…

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular variational inference algorithm which simulates an interacting particle system to approximately sample from a target distribution, with impressive empirical performance across various…

Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution…