Related papers: Moreau-Yosida $f$-divergences
We show that the variational representations for f-divergences currently used in the literature can be tightened. This has implications to a number of methods recently proposed based on this representation. As an example application we use…
Bayesian inference has many advantages for complex models, but standard Monte Carlo methods for summarizing the posterior can be computationally demanding, and it is attractive to consider optimization-based variational methods. Our work…
Commonly used $f$-divergences of measures, e.g., the Kullback-Leibler divergence, are subject to limitations regarding the support of the involved measures. A remedy is regularizing the $f$-divergence by a squared maximum mean discrepancy…
Modern applications of Bayesian inference involve models that are sufficiently complex that the corresponding posterior distributions are intractable and must be approximated. The most common approximation is based on Markov chain Monte…
This paper provides a more rigorous look at Relativistic Generative Adversarial Networks (RGANs). We prove that the objective function of the discriminator is a statistical divergence for any concave function $f$ with minimal properties…
The Poisson model is frequently employed to describe count data, but in a Bayesian context it leads to an analytically intractable posterior probability distribution. In this work, we analyze a variational Gaussian approximation to the…
The families of $f$-divergences (e.g. the Kullback-Leibler divergence) and Integral Probability Metrics (e.g. total variation distance or maximum mean discrepancies) are widely used to quantify the similarity between probability…
Variational Bayesian inference is an important machine-learning tool that finds application from statistics to robotics. The goal is to find an approximate probability density function (PDF) from a chosen family that is in some sense…
Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…
$f$-divergences are a general class of divergences between probability measures which include as special cases many commonly used divergences in probability, mathematical statistics and information theory such as Kullback-Leibler…
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…
In this paper, we propose a novel loss function for training Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) aiming towards deeper theoretical understanding as well as improved stability and performance for the underlying optimization problem. The…
Variational Inference is a powerful tool in the Bayesian modeling toolkit, however, its effectiveness is determined by the expressivity of the utilized variational distributions in terms of their ability to match the true posterior…
In a variety of applications it is important to extract information from a probability measure $\mu$ on an infinite dimensional space. Examples include the Bayesian approach to inverse problems and possibly conditioned) continuous time…
Gaussian processes (GPs) offer a flexible class of priors for nonparametric Bayesian regression, but popular GP posterior inference methods are typically prohibitively slow or lack desirable finite-data guarantees on quality. We develop an…
We derive a new variational formula for the R\'enyi family of divergences, $R_\alpha(Q\|P)$, between probability measures $Q$ and $P$. Our result generalizes the classical Donsker-Varadhan variational formula for the Kullback-Leibler…
We construct optimal low-rank approximations for the Gaussian posterior distribution in linear Gaussian inverse problems with possibly infinite-dimensional separable Hilbert parameter spaces and finite-dimensional data spaces. We first…
Variational representations of divergences and distances between high-dimensional probability distributions offer significant theoretical insights and practical advantages in numerous research areas. Recently, they have gained popularity in…
The Jeffreys divergence is a renown symmetrization of the oriented Kullback-Leibler divergence broadly used in information sciences. Since the Jeffreys divergence between Gaussian mixture models is not available in closed-form, various…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved great success in data generation. However, its statistical properties are not fully understood. In this paper, we consider the statistical behavior of the general $f$-divergence…