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Related papers: Sliced Wasserstein Variational Inference

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The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is frequently used in data science. For discrete distributions on large state spaces, approximations of probability vectors may result in a few small negative entries, rendering the KL divergence…

We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…

Computation · Statistics 2014-07-29 Tim Salimans , David A. Knowles

Wasserstein distances are increasingly used in a wide variety of applications in machine learning. Sliced Wasserstein distances form an important subclass which may be estimated efficiently through one-dimensional sorting operations. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-04-08 Mark Rowland , Jiri Hron , Yunhao Tang , Krzysztof Choromanski , Tamas Sarlos , Adrian Weller

Approximate inference techniques are the cornerstone of probabilistic methods based on Gaussian process priors. Despite this, most work approximately optimizes standard divergence measures such as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Rui Zhang , Christian J. Walder , Edwin V. Bonilla , Marian-Andrei Rizoiu , Lexing Xie

The Wasserstein distance is a distance between two probability distributions and has recently gained increasing popularity in statistics and machine learning, owing to its attractive properties. One important approach to extending this…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-02-14 Ryo Okano , Masaaki Imaizumi

The Laplace approximation has been one of the workhorses of Bayesian inference. It often delivers good approximations in practice despite the fact that it does not strictly take into account where the volume of posterior density lies.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-02 Nikolaos Gianniotis

This paper serves as a user's guide to sampling strategies for sliced optimal transport. We provide reminders and additional regularity results on the Sliced Wasserstein distance. We detail the construction methods, generation time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Keanu Sisouk , Julie Delon , Julien Tierny

Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) are widely used in machine learning for tasks such as clustering, classification, image reconstruction, and generative modeling. A key challenge in working with GMMs is defining a computationally efficient and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Moritz Piening , Robert Beinert

The Wasserstein probability metric has received much attention from the machine learning community. Unlike the Kullback-Leibler divergence, which strictly measures change in probability, the Wasserstein metric reflects the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-01 Marc G. Bellemare , Ivo Danihelka , Will Dabney , Shakir Mohamed , Balaji Lakshminarayanan , Stephan Hoyer , Rémi Munos

Generalized sliced Wasserstein distance is a variant of sliced Wasserstein distance that exploits the power of non-linear projection through a given defining function to better capture the complex structures of the probability…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-20 Dung Le , Huy Nguyen , Khai Nguyen , Trang Nguyen , Nhat Ho

Optimization in the Bures-Wasserstein space has been gaining popularity in the machine learning community since it draws connections between variational inference and Wasserstein gradient flows. The variational inference objective function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Hoang Phuc Hau Luu , Hanlin Yu , Bernardo Williams , Marcelo Hartmann , Arto Klami

Estimating Kullback-Leibler divergence from identical and independently distributed samples is an important problem in various domains. One simple and effective estimator is based on the k nearest neighbor distances between these samples.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-02-27 Puning Zhao , Lifeng Lai

In inverse problems, many conditional generative models approximate the posterior measure by minimizing a distance between the joint measure and its learned approximation. While this approach also controls the distance between the posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Jannis Chemseddine , Paul Hagemann , Gabriele Steidl , Christian Wald

Variational inference (VI) is a popular approach in Bayesian inference, that looks for the best approximation of the posterior distribution within a parametric family, minimizing a loss that is typically the (reverse) Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Marguerite Petit-Talamon , Marc Lambert , Anna Korba

Sliced optimal transport reduces optimal transport on multi-dimensional domains to transport on the line. More precisely, sliced optimal transport is the concatenation of the well-known Radon transform and the cumulative density transform,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-07-03 Michael Quellmalz , Robert Beinert , Gabriele Steidl

In this paper, we address the classification of instances each characterized not by a singular point, but by a distribution on a vector space. We employ the Wasserstein metric to measure distances between distributions, which are then used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-27 Jia Li , Lin Lin

The Wasserstein distance has been an attractive tool in many fields. But due to its high computational complexity and the phenomenon of the curse of dimensionality in empirical estimation, various extensions of the Wasserstein distance have…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-09-07 Xianliang Xu , Zhongyi Huang

We develop a method to combine Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and variational inference (VI), leveraging the advantages of both inference approaches. Specifically, we improve the variational distribution by running a few MCMC steps. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-29 Francisco J. R. Ruiz , Michalis K. Titsias

We address the problem of efficiently computing Wasserstein distances for multiple pairs of distributions drawn from a meta-distribution. To this end, we propose a fast estimation method based on regressing Wasserstein distance on sliced…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Khai Nguyen , Hai Nguyen , Nhat Ho

Sliced Wasserstein distances are widely used in practice as a computationally efficient alternative to Wasserstein distances in high dimensions. In this paper, motivated by theoretical foundations of this alternative, we prove quantitative…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-21 Guillaume Carlier , Alessio Figalli , Quentin Mérigot , Yi Wang