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Related papers: Sampling with Mirrored Stein Operators

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This paper is concerned with multi-agent optimization problem. A distributed randomized gradient-free mirror descent (DRGFMD) method is developed by introducing a randomized gradient-free oracle in the mirror descent scheme where the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-12 Zhan Yu , Daniel W. C. Ho , Deming Yuan

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

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-06-02 Lukang Sun , Avetik Karagulyan , Peter Richtarik

A fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference is efficient representation of a target distribution. Many non-parametric approaches do so by sampling a large number of points using variants of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Cole Hawkins , Alec Koppel , Zheng Zhang

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 explores the connections between tempering (for Sequential Monte Carlo; SMC) and entropic mirror descent to sample from a target probability distribution whose unnormalized density is known. We establish that tempering SMC…

Computation · Statistics 2024-06-18 Nicolas Chopin , Francesca R. Crucinio , Anna Korba

Stein importance sampling is a widely applicable technique based on kernelized Stein discrepancy, which corrects the output of approximate sampling algorithms by reweighting the empirical distribution of the samples. A general analysis of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-09-14 Liam Hodgkinson , Robert Salomone , Fred Roosta

As the problem of minimizing functionals on the Wasserstein space encompasses many applications in machine learning, different optimization algorithms on $\mathbb{R}^d$ have received their counterpart analog on the Wasserstein space. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-20 Clément Bonet , Théo Uscidda , Adam David , Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski , Anna Korba

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

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

Modern successes of diffusion models in learning complex, high-dimensional data distributions are attributed, in part, to their capability to construct diffusion processes with analytic transition kernels and score functions. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-01 Guan-Horng Liu , Tianrong Chen , Evangelos A. Theodorou , Molei Tao

We propose kernel-gradient drifting, a one-step generative modeling framework that replaces the fixed Euclidean displacement direction in drifting models with directions induced by the kernel itself. Standard drifting is attractive because…

Discretization of continuous-time diffusion processes is a widely recognized method for sampling. However, it seems to be a considerable restriction when the potentials are often required to be smooth (gradient Lipschitz). This paper…

Computation · Statistics 2022-02-23 Dao Nguyen

We provide finite-particle convergence rates for the Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm in the Kernelized Stein Discrepancy ($\mathsf{KSD}$) and Wasserstein-2 metrics. Our key insight is that the time derivative of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-10 Sayan Banerjee , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Promit Ghosal

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

The forward Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a ubiquitous objective for fitting a parameterized distribution to samples due to its tractability and equivalence to maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Its inherent asymmetry, however, may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Omri Ben-Dov , Luiz F. O. Chamon

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

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

Mirror Descent is a popular algorithm, that extends Gradients Descent (GD) beyond the Euclidean geometry. One of its benefits is to enable strong convergence guarantees through smooth-like analyses, even for objectives with exploding or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-19 Hadrien Hendrikx

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