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Related papers: Neural Variational Gradient Descent

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We propose a simple algorithm to train stochastic neural networks to draw samples from given target distributions for probabilistic inference. Our method is based on iteratively adjusting the neural network parameters so that the output…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-01 Yihao Feng , Dilin Wang , Qiang Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Natanael Alpay , Emeric Battaglia

Current state-of-the-art optimizers are adaptive gradient-based optimization methods such as Adam. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in formulating gradient-based optimizers in a probabilistic framework for better modeling the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Haotian Chen , Anna Kuzina , Babak Esmaeili , Jakub M Tomczak

Deep neural networks (DNN) are typically optimized using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the estimation of the gradient using stochastic samples tends to be noisy and unreliable, resulting in large gradient variance and bad…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Xingyi Yang

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

Among dissimilarities between probability distributions, the Kernel Stein Discrepancy (KSD) has received much interest recently. We investigate the properties of its Wasserstein gradient flow to approximate a target probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-24 Anna Korba , Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski , Szymon Majewski , Pierre Ablin

Bayesian inference problems require sampling or approximating high-dimensional probability distributions. The focus of this paper is on the recently introduced Stein variational gradient descent methodology, a class of algorithms that rely…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 A. Duncan , N. Nuesken , L. Szpruch

We introduce $\textit{Stein transport}$, a novel methodology for Bayesian inference designed to efficiently push an ensemble of particles along a predefined curve of tempered probability distributions. The driving vector field is chosen…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-02 Nikolas Nüsken

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Azar Louzi

Several emerging post-Bayesian methods target a probability distribution for which an entropy-regularised variational objective is minimised. This increased flexibility introduces a computational challenge, as one loses access to an…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-17 Clémentine Chazal , Heishiro Kanagawa , Zheyang Shen , Anna Korba , Chris. J. Oates

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Jie Chen , Ronny Luss

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a widely used sampling algorithm that has been successfully applied in several areas of Machine Learning. SVGD operates by iteratively moving a set of interacting particles (which represent the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Victor Priser , Pascal Bianchi , Adil Salim

Bayesian inference plays an important role in advancing machine learning, but faces computational challenges when applied to complex models such as deep neural networks. Variational inference circumvents these challenges by formulating…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-03 Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan , Didrik Nielsen

Generative adversarial networks (GANs), famous for the capability of learning complex underlying data distribution, are however known to be tricky in the training process, which would probably result in mode collapse or performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-23 Dong Wang , Xiaoqian Qin , Fengyi Song , Li Cheng

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-23 Gerard Ben Arous , Reza Gheissari , Aukosh Jagannath

Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-23 Stephan Mandt , Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

In this study, we propose a Bayesian seismic tomography inference method using physics-informed neural networks (PINN). PINN represents a recent advance in deep learning, offering the possibility to enhance physics-based simulations and…

Geophysics · Physics 2023-07-19 Ryoichiro Agata , Kazuya Shiraishi , Gou Fujie

We derive finite-particle rates for the regularized Stein variational gradient descent (R-SVGD) algorithm introduced by He et al. (2024) that corrects the constant-order bias of the SVGD by applying a resolvent-type preconditioner to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Ye He , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Sayan Banerjee , Promit Ghosal

We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-06 Wenqing Hu , Chris Junchi Li , Lei Li , Jian-Guo Liu

Posterior distributions arising in ill-posed Bayesian inverse problems are often both analytically intractable and highly sensitive to parameters of the chosen prior family. We aim to understand the sensitivity of intractable posterior…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-20 Yucong Liu , Zilai Si , Alexander Strang