Related papers: The equivalence between Stein variational gradient…
Bayesian methods estimate a measure of uncertainty by using the posterior distribution. One source of difficulty in these methods is the computation of the normalizing constant. Calculating exact posterior is generally intractable and we…
The application of neural network models to scientific machine learning tasks has proliferated in recent years. In particular, neural network models have proved to be adept at modeling processes with spatial-temporal complexity.…
Recent progress in variational inference has paid much attention to the flexibility of variational posteriors. One promising direction is to use implicit distributions, i.e., distributions without tractable densities as the variational…
Along with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, variational inference (VI) has emerged as a central computational approach to large-scale Bayesian inference. Rather than sampling from the true posterior $\pi$, VI aims at producing a…
Variational inference (VI) is a popular method for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. In this paper, we introduce a general framework for quantifying the statistical…
Inverse problems and, in particular, inferring unknown or latent parameters from data are ubiquitous in engineering simulations. A predominant viewpoint in identifying unknown parameters is Bayesian inference where both prior information…
We develop nested variational inference (NVI), a family of methods that learn proposals for nested importance samplers by minimizing an forward or reverse KL divergence at each level of nesting. NVI is applicable to many commonly-used…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely believed to perform implicit regularization when used to train deep neural networks, but the precise manner in which this occurs has thus far been elusive. We prove that SGD minimizes an average…
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…
In this article a surprising result is demonstrated using the neural tangent kernel. This kernel is defined as the inner product of the vector of the gradient of an underlying model evaluated at training points. This kernel is used to…
In recent years, Full-Waveform Inversion (FWI) has been extensively used to derive high-resolution subsurface velocity models from seismic data. However, due to the nonlinearity and ill-posed nature of the problem, FWI requires a good…
Approximate Bayesian inference estimates descriptors of an intractable target distribution - in essence, an optimization problem within a family of distributions. For example, Langevin dynamics (LD) extracts asymptotically exact samples…
Bayesian calibration of black-box computer models offers an established framework to obtain a posterior distribution over model parameters. Traditional Bayesian calibration involves the emulation of the computer model and an additive model…
We show that the behavior of stochastic gradient descent is related to Bayesian statistics by showing that SGD is effectively diffusion on a fractal landscape, where the fractal dimension can be accounted for in a purely Bayesian way. By…
We propose a fast and scalable variational method for Bayesian inference in high-dimensional parameter space, which we call projected Stein variational Newton (pSVN) method. We exploit the intrinsic low-dimensional geometric structure of…
Multilevel Stein variational gradient descent is a method for particle-based variational inference that leverages hierarchies of surrogate target distributions with varying costs and fidelity to computationally speed up inference. The…
The mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is widely used in training machine learning models, in particular deep learning models. We study SGD dynamics under linear regression and two-layer linear networks, with an easy…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have become one of the dominant methods for deep generative modeling. Despite their demonstrated success on multiple vision tasks, GANs are difficult to train and much research has been dedicated…
Generalized Bayesian Inference (GBI) provides a flexible framework for updating prior distributions using various loss functions instead of the traditional likelihoods, thereby enhancing the model robustness to model misspecification.…