Related papers: Stochastic Stein Discrepancies
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) was recently proposed as a general purpose nonparametric variational inference algorithm [Liu & Wang, NIPS 2016]: it minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the target distribution and its…
Learning a stationary diffusion amounts to estimating the parameters of a stochastic differential equation whose stationary distribution matches a target distribution. We build on the recently introduced kernel deviation from stationarity…
This monograph provides a rigorous overview of theoretical and methodological aspects of probabilistic inference and learning with Stein's method. Recipes are provided for constructing Stein discrepancies from Stein operators and Stein…
We investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…
In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to improve model performance on an unlabeled target domain using a related, labeled source domain. A common approach aligns source and target feature distributions by minimizing a distance between…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…
It is well-known that the reparameterisation gradient estimator, which exhibits low variance in practice, is biased for non-differentiable models. This may compromise correctness of gradient-based optimisation methods such as stochastic…
Gradient estimation -- approximating the gradient of an expectation with respect to the parameters of a distribution -- is central to the solution of many machine learning problems. However, when the distribution is discrete, most common…
We propose a novel distributed inference algorithm for continuous graphical models, by extending Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to leverage the Markov dependency structure of the distribution of interest. Our approach combines…
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…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are widely used and highly effective optimization methods in machine learning, especially for neural network training. By using a single datum or a small subset of the data, selected…
The fluctuation effect of gradient expectation and variance caused by parameter update between consecutive iterations is neglected or confusing by current mainstream gradient optimization algorithms.Using this fluctuation effect, combined…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…
Stochastic iterative algorithms, including stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD), are widely utilized for optimization and sampling in large-scale and high-dimensional problems in machine…
A non-parametric extension of control variates is presented. These leverage gradient information on the sampling density to achieve substantial variance reduction. It is not required that the sampling density be normalised. The novel…
When using stochastic gradient descent to solve large-scale machine learning problems, a common practice of data processing is to shuffle the training data, partition the data across multiple machines if needed, and then perform several…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…
Variational inference approximates the posterior distribution of a probabilistic model with a parameterized density by maximizing a lower bound for the model evidence. Modern solutions fit a flexible approximation with stochastic gradient…