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Related papers: Sliced Wasserstein Variational Inference

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The problem of filtering information from large correlation matrices is of great importance in many applications. We have recently proposed the use of the Kullback-Leibler distance to measure the performance of filtering algorithms in…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2008-12-02 M. Tumminello , F. Lillo , R. N. Mantegna

Recent work has attempted to directly approximate the `function-space' or predictive posterior distribution of Bayesian models, without approximating the posterior distribution over the parameters. This is appealing in e.g. Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-19 David R. Burt , Sebastian W. Ober , Adrià Garriga-Alonso , Mark van der Wilk

This paper introduces a variational approximation framework using direct optimization of what is known as the {\it scale invariant Alpha-Beta divergence} (sAB divergence). This new objective encompasses most variational objectives that use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-22 Jean-Baptiste Regli , Ricardo Silva

It was recently shown that under smoothness conditions, the squared Wasserstein distance between two distributions could be efficiently computed with appealing statistical error upper bounds. However, rather than the distance itself, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-30 Boris Muzellec , Adrien Vacher , Francis Bach , François-Xavier Vialard , Alessandro Rudi

The optimal transport (OT) problem has gained significant traction in modern machine learning for its ability to: (1) provide versatile metrics, such as Wasserstein distances and their variants, and (2) determine optimal couplings between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Xinran Liu , Rocío Díaz Martín , Yikun Bai , Ashkan Shahbazi , Matthew Thorpe , Akram Aldroubi , Soheil Kolouri

To overcome computational challenges of Optimal Transport (OT), several variants of Sliced Wasserstein (SW) has been developed in the literature. These approaches exploit the closed-form expression of the univariate OT by projecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Hoang V. Tran , Khoi N. M. Nguyen , Trang Pham , Thanh T. Chu , Tam Le , Tan M. Nguyen

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence plays a central role in probabilistic machine learning, where it commonly serves as the canonical loss function. Optimization in such settings is often performed over the probability simplex, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Adwait Datar , Nihat Ay

Applications of optimal transport have recently gained remarkable attention thanks to the computational advantages of entropic regularization. However, in most situations the Sinkhorn approximation of the Wasserstein distance is replaced by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-04 Giulia Luise , Alessandro Rudi , Massimiliano Pontil , Carlo Ciliberto

We consider the problem of constructing a least conservative estimator of the expected value $\mu$ of a non-negative heavy-tailed random variable. We require that the probability of overestimating the expected value $\mu$ is kept…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-21 Bart P. G. van Parys , Bert Zwart

We introduce a novel optimal transport framework for probabilistic circuits (PCs). While it has been shown recently that divergences between distributions represented as certain classes of PCs can be computed tractably, to the best of our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Adrian Ciotinga , YooJung Choi

We study the problem of minimizing the Wasserstein distance between a probability distribution and an algebraic variety. We consider the setting of finite state spaces and describe the solution depending on the choice of the ground metric…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-15 T. Ö. Çelik , A. Jamneshan , G. Montúfar , B. Sturmfels , L. Venturello

Comparing probability distributions is at the crux of many machine learning algorithms. Maximum Mean Discrepancies (MMD) and Wasserstein distances are two classes of distances between probability distributions that have attracted abundant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-01 Titouan Vayer , Rémi Gribonval

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a fundamental equation of information theory that quantifies the proximity of two probability distributions. Although difficult to understand by examining the equation, an intuition and understanding…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-04-09 Jonathon Shlens

The conventional sliced Wasserstein is defined between two probability measures that have realizations as vectors. When comparing two probability measures over images, practitioners first need to vectorize images and then project them to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-09-26 Khai Nguyen , Nhat Ho

The Wasserstein distance is an attractive tool for data analysis but statistical inference is hindered by the lack of distributional limits. To overcome this obstacle, for probability measures supported on finitely many points, we derive…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-04-27 Max Sommerfeld , Axel Munk

This paper presents a distance-based discriminative framework for learning with probability distributions. Instead of using kernel mean embeddings or generalized radial basis kernels, we introduce embeddings based on dissimilarity of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-16 Alain Rakotomamonjy , Abraham Traoré , Maxime Berar , Rémi Flamary , Nicolas Courty

We investigate the use of alternative divergences to Kullback-Leibler (KL) in variational inference(VI), based on the Variational Dropout \cite{kingma2015}. Stochastic gradient variational Bayes (SGVB) \cite{aevb} is a general framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-15 Bogdan Mazoure , Riashat Islam

We introduce a new version of the KL-divergence for Gaussian distributions which is based on Wasserstein geometry and referred to as WKL-divergence. We show that this version is consistent with the geometry of the sample space ${\Bbb R}^n$.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-29 Adwait Datar , Nihat Ay

Monte Carlo (MC) integration has been employed as the standard approximation method for the Sliced Wasserstein (SW) distance, whose analytical expression involves an intractable expectation. However, MC integration is not optimal in terms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-19 Khai Nguyen , Nicola Bariletto , Nhat Ho

We present a unified technique for sequential estimation of convex divergences between distributions, including integral probability metrics like the kernel maximum mean discrepancy, $\varphi$-divergences like the Kullback-Leibler…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-03-14 Tudor Manole , Aaditya Ramdas