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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Peng Chen , Omar Ghattas

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-20 Alex Leviyev , Joshua Chen , Yifei Wang , Omar Ghattas , Aaron Zimmerman

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-20 Thomas Pinder , Christopher Nemeth , David Leslie

A central challenge in Bayesian inference is efficiently approximating posterior distributions. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular variational inference method which transports a set of particles to approximate a target…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-05 Moritz Melcher , Simon Weissmann , Ashia C. Wilson , Jakob Zech

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a deterministic interacting-particle method for sampling from a target probability measure given access to its score function. In the mean-field and continuous-time limit, it is known that the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Lénaïc Chizat , Maria Colombo , Roberto Colombo , Xavier Fernández-Real

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-11 Dilin Wang , Zhe Zeng , Qiang Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Adil Salim , Lukang Sun , Peter Richtárik

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…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-12 Xin Zhu , Hongyi Pan , Salih Atici , Ahmet Enis Cetin

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-26 Jackson Gorham , Anant Raj , Lester Mackey

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…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-05-02 Terrence Alsup , Tucker Hartland , Benjamin Peherstorfer , Noemi Petra

We present a new particle filtering algorithm for nonlinear systems in the discrete-time setting. Our algorithm is based on the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) framework, which is a general approach to sample from a target…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Jiaojiao Fan , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Yongxin Chen

We provide the first finite-particle convergence rate for Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), a popular algorithm for approximating a probability distribution with a collection of particles. Specifically, whenever the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Jiaxin Shi , Lester Mackey

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Cornelius V. Braun , Robert T. Lange , Marc Toussaint

Bayesian inference for doubly intractable distributions is challenging because they include intractable terms, which are functions of parameters of interest. Although several alternatives have been developed for such models, they are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-08 Heesang Lee , Songhee Kim , Bokgyeong Kang , Jaewoo Park

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Ola Rønning , Eric Nalisnick , Christophe Ley , Padhraic Smyth , Thomas Hamelryck

Gradient-based approximate inference methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), provide simple and general-purpose inference engines for differentiable continuous distributions. However, existing forms of SVGD cannot be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Jun Han , Fan Ding , Xianglong Liu , Lorenzo Torresani , Jian Peng , Qiang Liu

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a popular sampling algorithm used in various machine learning tasks. It is well known that SVGD arises from a discretization of the kernelized gradient flow of the Kullback-Leibler divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Lukang Sun , Peter Richtárik

We are interested in gradient-based Explicit Generative Modeling where samples can be derived from iterative gradient updates based on an estimate of the score function of the data distribution. Recent advances in Stochastic Gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-08 Wei-Cheng Chang , Chun-Liang Li , Youssef Mroueh , Yiming Yang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-31 Gianluca Detommaso , Tiangang Cui , Alessio Spantini , Youssef Marzouk , Robert Scheichl

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…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-09-01 Liang Yan , Tao Zhou