Related papers: SVGD as a kernelized Wasserstein gradient flow of …
Wasserstein distance (WD) and the associated optimal transport plan have been proven useful in many applications where probability measures are at stake. In this paper, we propose a new proxy of the squared WD, coined min-SWGG, that is…
This paper studies the optimization of the KL functional on the Wasserstein space of probability measures, and develops a sampling framework based on Wasserstein gradient descent (WGD). We identify two important subclasses of 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…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a general-purpose optimization-based sampling algorithm that has recently exploded in popularity, but is limited by two issues: it is known to produce biased samples, and it can be slow to…
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…
Variational Inference approximates an unnormalized distribution via the minimization of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Although this divergence is efficient for computation and has been widely used in applications, it suffers from some…
Bayesian computation plays an important role in modern machine learning and statistics to reason about uncertainty. A key computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to develop efficient techniques to approximate, or draw samples from…
Stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) is a popular variance reduction technique for accelerating stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We provide a first analysis of the method for solving a class of linear inverse problems in the lens…
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 a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of…
We derive finite-particle rates for the regularized Stein variational gradient descent (R-SVGD) algorithm introduced by He et al. (2024) that corrects the constant-order bias of the SVGD by applying a resolvent-type preconditioner to the…
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…
Ensembles of deep neural networks have achieved great success recently, but they do not offer a proper Bayesian justification. Moreover, while they allow for averaging of predictions over several hypotheses, they do not provide any…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular particle-based method for Bayesian inference. However, its convergence suffers from the variance collapse, which reduces the accuracy and diversity of the estimation. In this paper, we…
The curse of dimensionality is a longstanding challenge in Bayesian inference in high dimensions. In this work, we propose a projected Stein variational gradient descent (pSVGD) method to overcome this challenge by exploiting the…
Gradient flows of the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence, such as the Fokker--Planck equation and Stein Variational Gradient Descent, evolve a distribution toward a target density known only up to a normalizing constant. We introduce new…
Sampling from an unnormalized target distribution is an essential problem with many applications in probabilistic inference. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful method that iteratively updates a set of…
Recently, Deng et al. (2026) proposed Generative Modeling via Drifting (GMD), a novel framework for generative tasks. This note presents an analysis of GMD through the lens of Wasserstein Gradient Flows (WGF), i.e., the path of steepest…
Traditional preamble detection algorithms have low accuracy in the grant-based random access scheme in massive machine-type communication (mMTC). We present a novel preamble detection algorithm based on Stein variational gradient descent…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used techniques for online optimization in machine learning. In this work, we accelerate SGD by adaptively learning how to sample the most useful training examples at each time…