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Related papers: Kernel Stein Discrepancy Descent

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Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a widely used in practice algorithm for scalable sampling with deterministic particle updates. We study its behavior in the singular limit where the kernel bandwidth tends to zero. In this…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2026-05-06 José A. Carrillo , Jakub Skrzeczkowski , Jethro Warnett

Non-parametric goodness-of-fit testing procedures based on kernel Stein discrepancies (KSD) are promising approaches to validate general unnormalised distributions in various scenarios. Existing works focused on studying kernel choices to…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-02 Wenkai Xu

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

Kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a widely used kernel-based measure of discrepancy between probability measures. It is often employed in the scenario where a user has a collection of samples from a candidate probability measure and wishes…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-02-13 George Wynne , Mikołaj Kasprzak , Andrew B. Duncan

Particle-based approximate Bayesian inference approaches such as Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) combine the flexibility and convergence guarantees of sampling methods with the computational benefits of variational inference. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Lauro Langosco di Langosco , Vincent Fortuin , Heiko Strathmann

Computable Stein discrepancies have been deployed for a variety of applications, ranging from sampler selection in posterior inference to approximate Bayesian inference to goodness-of-fit testing. Existing convergence-determining Stein…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-12 Jonathan H. Huggins , Lester Mackey

Approximate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) offers the promise of more rapid sampling at the cost of more biased inference. Since standard MCMC diagnostics fail to detect these biases, researchers have developed computable Stein discrepancy…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-16 Jackson Gorham , Lester Mackey

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 Fabian Bleile , Sarah Lumpp , Mathias Drton

Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD) is a score-based discrepancy widely used in goodness-of-fit tests. It can be applied even when the target distribution has an unknown normalising factor, such as in Bayesian analysis. We show theoretically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-06 Xing Liu , Andrew B. Duncan , Axel Gandy

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based particle method for sampling from a target distribution, e.g., in generative modeling and Bayesian inference. SVGD does not require estimating the gradient of the log-density,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-10 Viktor Stein , Wuchen Li

Distributional comparison is a fundamental problem in statistical data analysis with numerous applications in a variety of scientific and engineering fields. Numerous methods exist for distributional comparison but kernel Stein's method has…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-12 Xiaoda Qu , Baba C. Vemuri

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a kernel-based and non-parametric particle method for sampling from a target distribution, such as in Bayesian inference and other machine learning tasks. Different from other particle methods,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-02 Viktor Stein , Wuchen Li

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…

Computation · Statistics 2026-02-04 Van Chien Ta , Thi Mai Hong Chu , Minh-Ngoc Tran

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

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-12 Stephan Mandt , Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), a popular sampling algorithm, is often described as the kernelized gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler divergence in the geometry of optimal transport. We introduce a new perspective on SVGD…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-06-05 Sinho Chewi , Thibaut Le Gouic , Chen Lu , Tyler Maunu , Philippe Rigollet

We propose a goodness-of-fit measure for probability densities modeling observations with varying dimensionality, such as text documents of differing lengths or variable-length sequences. The proposed measure is an instance of the kernel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-14 Jerome Baum , Heishiro Kanagawa , Arthur Gretton

Kernel Stein discrepancies (KSDs) have emerged as a powerful tool for quantifying goodness-of-fit over the last decade, featuring numerous successful applications. To the best of our knowledge, all existing KSD estimators with known rate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Jose Cribeiro-Ramallo , Agnideep Aich , Florian Kalinke , Ashit Baran Aich , Zoltán Szabó

This paper proposes and studies a numerical method for approximation of posterior expectations based on interpolation with a Stein reproducing kernel. Finite-sample-size bounds on the approximation error are established for posterior…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-01-12 Alessandro Barp , Chris. J. Oates , Emilio Porcu , Mark Girolami

Maximum mean discrepancies (MMDs) like the kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD) have grown central to a wide range of applications, including hypothesis testing, sampler selection, distribution approximation, and variational inference. In each…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-26 Alessandro Barp , Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel , Mark Girolami , Lester Mackey