Related papers: Kernel Stein Discrepancy Descent

Stein discrepancies have emerged as a powerful statistical tool, being applied to fundamental statistical problems including parameter inference, goodness-of-fit testing, and sampling. The canonical Stein discrepancies require the…

We introduce a new family of particle evolution samplers suitable for constrained domains and non-Euclidean geometries. Stein Variational Mirror Descent and Mirrored Stein Variational Gradient Descent minimize the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

The Stein Variational Gradient Descent method is a variational inference method in statistics that has recently received a lot of attention. The method provides a deterministic approximation of the target distribution, by introducing a…

We propose a kernel-based nonparametric test of relative goodness of fit, where the goal is to compare two models, both of which may have unobserved latent variables, such that the marginal distribution of the observed variables is…

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…

We construct a Wasserstein gradient flow of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and study its convergence properties. The MMD is an integral probability metric defined for a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), and serves as a metric on…

Diffusion models show promise for image restoration, but existing methods often struggle with inconsistent fidelity and undesirable artifacts. To address this, we introduce Kernel Density Steering (KDS), a novel inference-time framework…

Measure transport underpins several recent algorithms for posterior approximation in the Bayesian context, wherein a transport map is sought to minimise the Kullback--Leibler divergence (KLD) from the posterior to the approximation. The KLD…

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence plays a central role in probabilistic machine learning, where it commonly serves as the canonical loss function. Optimization in such settings is often performed over the probability simplex, where the…

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…

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…

Persistence diagrams (PDs) play a key role in topological data analysis (TDA), in which they are routinely used to describe topological properties of complicated shapes. PDs enjoy strong stability properties and have proven their utility in…

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…

We propose conditional flows of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) with the negative distance kernel for posterior sampling and conditional generative modeling. This MMD, which is also known as energy distance, has several advantageous…

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is an important alternative to the Langevin-type algorithms for sampling from probability distributions of the form $\pi(x) \propto \exp(-V(x))$. In the existing theory of Langevin-type algorithms…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a known stochastic iterative method popular for large-scale convex optimization problems due to its simple implementation and scalability. Some objectives, such as those found in complex-valued neural…

A crucial task in predictive maintenance is estimating the remaining useful life of physical systems. In the last decade, deep learning has improved considerably upon traditional model-based and statistical approaches in terms of predictive…

This paper proposes a novel parameter selection strategy for kernel-based gradient descent (KGD) algorithms, integrating bias-variance analysis with the splitting method. We introduce the concept of empirical effective dimension to quantify…

Gradient flow in the 2-Wasserstein space is widely used to optimize functionals over probability distributions and is typically implemented using an interacting particle system with $n$ particles. Analyzing these algorithms requires showing…

We propose a novel adaptive importance sampling algorithm which incorporates Stein variational gradient decent algorithm (SVGD) with importance sampling (IS). Our algorithm leverages the nonparametric transforms in SVGD to iteratively…