Related papers: A unified view of likelihood ratio and reparameter…
Reparameterization (RP) and likelihood ratio (LR) gradient estimators are used throughout machine and reinforcement learning; however, they are usually explained as simple mathematical tricks without providing any insight into their nature.…
Optimization with noisy gradients has become ubiquitous in statistics and machine learning. Reparameterization gradients, or gradient estimates computed via the "reparameterization trick," represent a class of noisy gradients often used in…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
The reparameterization gradient has become a widely used method to obtain Monte Carlo gradients to optimize the variational objective. However, this technique does not easily apply to commonly used distributions such as beta or gamma…
ReParameterization (RP) Policy Gradient Methods (PGMs) have been widely adopted for continuous control tasks in robotics and computer graphics. However, recent studies have revealed that, when applied to long-term reinforcement learning…
In many fields of science, generalized likelihood ratio tests are established tools for statistical inference. At the same time, it has become increasingly common that a simulator (or generative model) is used to describe complex processes…
Variational inference using the reparameterization trick has enabled large-scale approximate Bayesian inference in complex probabilistic models, leveraging stochastic optimization to sidestep intractable expectations. The reparameterization…
Reinforcement learning methods for robotics are increasingly successful due to the constant development of better policy gradient techniques. A precise (low variance) and accurate (low bias) gradient estimator is crucial to face…
Efficient low-variance gradient estimation enabled by the reparameterization trick (RT) has been essential to the success of variational autoencoders. Doubly-reparameterized gradients (DReGs) improve on the RT for multi-sample variational…
The likelihood ratio is a crucial quantity for statistical inference in science that enables hypothesis testing, construction of confidence intervals, reweighting of distributions, and more. Many modern scientific applications, however,…
Efficient and biologically plausible alternatives to backpropagation in neural network training remain a challenge due to issues such as high computational complexity and additional assumptions about neural networks, which limit scalability…
This paper is a broad and accessible survey of the methods we have at our disposal for Monte Carlo gradient estimation in machine learning and across the statistical sciences: the problem of computing the gradient of an expectation of a…
Low-variance gradient estimation is crucial for learning directed graphical models parameterized by neural networks, where the reparameterization trick is widely used for those with continuous variables. While this technique gives…
By providing a simple and efficient way of computing low-variance gradients of continuous random variables, the reparameterization trick has become the technique of choice for training a variety of latent variable models. However, it is not…
Relative error estimation has been recently used in regression analysis. A crucial issue of the existing relative error estimation procedures is that they are sensitive to outliers. To address this issue, we employ the $\gamma$-likelihood…
Seeking to improve model generalization, we consider a new approach based on distributionally robust learning (DRL) that applies stochastic gradient descent to the outer minimization problem. Our algorithm efficiently estimates the gradient…
Recent work shows that path gradient estimators for normalizing flows have lower variance compared to standard estimators for variational inference, resulting in improved training. However, they are often prohibitively more expensive from a…
The probabilistic diffusion model (DM), generating content by inferencing through a recursive chain structure, has emerged as a powerful framework for visual generation. After pre-training on enormous data, the model needs to be properly…
Highly robust and efficient estimators for the generalized linear model with a dispersion parameter are proposed. The estimators are based on three steps. In the first step the maximum rank correlation estimator is used to consistently…
Reparameterizable densities are an important way to learn probability distributions in a deep learning setting. For many distributions it is possible to create low-variance gradient estimators by utilizing a `reparameterization trick'. Due…