Related papers: The equivalence between Stein variational gradient…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is an algorithm for sampling from a target density which is known up to a multiplicative constant. Although SVGD is a popular algorithm in practice, its theoretical study is limited to a few recent…
Despite recent theoretical progress on the non-convex optimization of two-layer neural networks, it is still an open question whether gradient descent on neural networks without unnatural modifications can achieve better sample complexity…
Variational inference (VI) seeks to approximate a target distribution $\pi$ by an element of a tractable family of distributions. Of key interest in statistics and machine learning is Gaussian VI, which approximates $\pi$ by minimizing the…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) lets us scale up Bayesian computation to massive data. It uses stochastic optimization to fit a variational distribution, following easy-to-compute noisy natural gradients. As with most traditional…
We highlight a fundamental connection between information geometry and variational Bayes (VB) and discuss its consequences for machine learning. Under certain conditions, a VB solution always requires estimation or computation of natural…
Particle-based variational inference (VI) minimizes the KL divergence between model samples and the target posterior with gradient flow estimates. With the popularity of Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), the focus of particle-based…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have recently regained a significant amount of attention in the deep learning community due to the development of scalable approximate Bayesian inference techniques. There are several advantages of using a…
Stein discrepancies (SDs) monitor convergence and non-convergence in approximate inference when exact integration and sampling are intractable. However, the computation of a Stein discrepancy can be prohibitive if the Stein operator - often…
Variational inference is an umbrella term for algorithms which cast Bayesian inference as optimization. Classically, variational inference uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence to define the optimization. Though this divergence has been…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) provides a simple and efficient way to solve a broad range of machine learning problems. Here, we focus on distribution regression (DR), involving two stages of sampling: Firstly, we regress from…
Recent work has demonstrated that Bayesian neural networks (BNN's) trained with mean field variational inference (MFVI) can be implemented in analog hardware, promising orders of magnitude energy savings compared to the standard digital…
We study statistical inverse learning in the context of nonlinear inverse problems under random design. Specifically, we address a class of nonlinear problems by employing gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold great promise as a flexible and principled solution to deal with uncertainty when learning from finite data. Among approaches to realize probabilistic inference in deep neural networks, variational Bayes…
Modern neural network architectures have achieved remarkable accuracies but remain highly dependent on their training data, often lacking interpretability in their learned mappings. While effective on large datasets, they tend to overfit on…
Bayesian neural networks (BNN) promise to combine the predictive performance of neural networks with principled uncertainty modeling important for safety-critical systems and decision making. However, posterior uncertainty estimates depend…
Black-box variational inference is widely used in situations where there is no proof that its stochastic optimization succeeds. We suggest this is due to a theoretical gap in existing stochastic optimization proofs: namely the challenge of…
Recently, particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods have gained interest because they can avoid arbitrary parametric assumptions that are common in variational inference. However, many ParVI approaches do not allow arbitrary…
Current black-box variational inference (BBVI) methods require the user to make numerous design choices -- such as the selection of variational objective and approximating family -- yet there is little principled guidance on how to do so.…
Stochastic variational inference (SVI) plays a key role in Bayesian deep learning. Recently various divergences have been proposed to design the surrogate loss for variational inference. We present a simple upper bound of the evidence as…
We propose and analyze a Stein variational reduced basis method (SVRB) to solve large-scale PDE-constrained Bayesian inverse problems. To address the computational challenge of drawing numerous samples requiring expensive PDE solves from…