English
Related papers

Related papers: Gradient estimators for normalising flows

200 papers

Recently there have been increasing interests in learning and inference with implicit distributions (i.e., distributions without tractable densities). To this end, we develop a gradient estimator for implicit distributions based on Stein's…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-11 Jiaxin Shi , Shengyang Sun , Jun Zhu

Gaussian mixture models form a flexible and expressive parametric family of distributions that has found applications in a wide variety of applications. Unfortunately, fitting these models to data is a notoriously hard problem from a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-05 Yuling Yan , Kaizheng Wang , Philippe Rigollet

Reparameterization (RP) and likelihood ratio (LR) gradient estimators are used to estimate gradients of expectations throughout machine learning and reinforcement learning; however, they are usually explained as simple mathematical tricks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Paavo Parmas , Masashi Sugiyama

Natural Gradient Descent, a second-degree optimization method motivated by the information geometry, makes use of the Fisher Information Matrix instead of the Hessian which is typically used. However, in many cases, the Fisher Information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Rajesh Shrestha

There are several applications of stochastic optimization where one can benefit from a robust estimate of the gradient. For example, domains such as distributed learning with corrupted nodes, the presence of large outliers in the training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-30 Fabian Schaipp , Guillaume Garrigos , Umut Simsekli , Robert Gower

This paper introduces feature gradient flow, a new technique for interpreting deep learning models in terms of features that are understandable to humans. The gradient flow of a model locally defines nonlinear coordinates in the input data…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-26 Yinzhu Jin , Jonathan C. Garneau , P. Thomas Fletcher

The need to calibrate increasingly complex statistical models requires a persistent effort for further advances on available, computationally intensive Monte Carlo methods. We study here an advanced version of familiar Markov Chain Monte…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-03-20 Alexandros Beskos , Konstantinos Kalogeropoulos , Erik Pazos

The class of $\alpha$-stable distributions enjoys multiple practical applications in signal processing, finance, biology and other areas because it allows to describe interesting and complex data patterns, such as asymmetry or heavy tails,…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-06-03 Eugenia Koblents , Joaquin Miguez , Marco A. Rodriguez , Alexandra M. Schmidt

Classifiers based on neural networks (NN) often lack a measure of uncertainty in the predicted class. We propose a method to estimate the probability mass function (PMF) of the different classes, as well as the covariance of the estimated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Magnus Malmström , Isaac Skog , Daniel Axehill , Fredrik Gustafsson

It is well understood that neural networks with carefully hand-picked weights provide powerful function approximation and that they can be successfully trained in over-parametrized regimes. Since over-parametrization ensures zero training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 G. Welper

We consider gradient descent with `momentum', a widely used method for loss function minimization in machine learning. This method is often used with `Nesterov acceleration', meaning that the gradient is evaluated not at the current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-20 Goran Nakerst , John Brennan , Masudul Haque

A Monte Carlo fluence estimator has been designed to take advantage of the computational power of graphical processing units (GPUs). This new estimator, termed the volumetric-ray-casting estimator, is an extension of the expected-value…

Computational Physics · Physics 2018-09-26 Jeremy E. Sweezy

A class of Monte Carlo algorithms which incorporate absorbing Markov chains is presented. In a particular limit, the lowest-order of these algorithms reduces to the $n$-fold way algorithm. These algorithms are applied to study the escape…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-10-22 M. A. Novotny

In light of the recent advancements in machine learning, we propose a novel approach to neutron source distribution estimation through the utilisation of probabilistic generative models. The estimation is based on a Monte Carlo particle…

Instrumentation and Detectors · Physics 2026-05-13 Jose Ignacio Robledo , Norberto Schmidt , Klaus Lieutenant , Jingjing Li , Stefan Kesselheim , Paul Zakalek

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods are a widely used set of computational tools for inference in non-linear non-Gaussian state-space models. We propose a new SMC algorithm to compute the expectation of additive functionals recursively.…

Methodology · Statistics 2010-12-27 Pierre Del Moral , Arnaud Doucet , Sumeetpal Singh

Bayesian max-margin models have shown superiority in various practical applications, such as text categorization, collaborative prediction, social network link prediction and crowdsourcing, and they conjoin the flexibility of Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-10-19 Wenbo Hu , Jun Zhu , Bo Zhang

It seems that in the current age, computers, computation, and data have an increasingly important role to play in scientific research and discovery. This is reflected in part by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Ronan Keane

Training energy-based probabilistic models is confronted with apparently intractable sums, whose Monte Carlo estimation requires sampling from the estimated probability distribution in the inner loop of training. This can be approximately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-13 Taesup Kim , Yoshua Bengio

Any gradient descent optimization requires to choose a learning rate. With deeper and deeper models, tuning that learning rate can easily become tedious and does not necessarily lead to an ideal convergence. We propose a variation of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-10 Mathieu Ravaut , Satya Gorti

In this article, we present a method for computing accurate and scalable nuclear forces within the phaseless auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) framework. Our approach leverages automatic differentiation of the energy functional to…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2026-02-16 Jo S. Kurian , Ankit Mahajan , Sandeep Sharma