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Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a prominent particle-based variational inference method used for sampling a target distribution. SVGD has attracted interest for application in machine-learning techniques such as Bayesian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Yuya Kawamura , Satoshi Takabe

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-12 Stephan Mandt , Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

We provide the first finite-particle convergence rate for Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), a popular algorithm for approximating a probability distribution with a collection of particles. Specifically, whenever the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Jiaxin Shi , Lester Mackey

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Cornelius V. Braun , Robert T. Lange , Marc Toussaint

Inspired by dynamic programming, we propose Stochastic Virtual Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm where the Virtual Gradient is defined by computational graph and automatic differentiation. The method is computationally efficient and has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-01 Zheng Li , Shi Shu

We propose in this work RBM-SVGD, a stochastic version of Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) method for efficiently sampling from a given probability measure and thus useful for Bayesian inference. The method is to apply the Random…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-24 Lei Li , Yingzhou Li , Jian-Guo Liu , Zibu Liu , Jianfeng Lu

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a recently proposed particle-based Bayesian inference method, which has attracted a lot of interest due to its remarkable approximation ability and particle efficiency compared to traditional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-11 Jingwei Zhuo , Chang Liu , Jiaxin Shi , Jun Zhu , Ning Chen , Bo Zhang

In this project, we propose a Variational Inference algorithm to approximate posterior distributions. Building on prior methods, we develop the Gradient-Steered Stein Variational Gradient Descent (G-SVGD) approach. This method introduces a…

Computation · Statistics 2025-02-03 Jose L. Varona-Santana , Marcos A. Capistrán

We propose a novel particle-based variational inference method designed to work with multimodal distributions. Our approach, referred to as Branched Stein Variational Gradient Descent (BSVGD), extends the classical Stein Variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Isaías Bañales , Arturo Jaramillo , Joshué Helí Ricalde-Guerrero

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

We are interested in gradient-based Explicit Generative Modeling where samples can be derived from iterative gradient updates based on an estimate of the score function of the data distribution. Recent advances in Stochastic Gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-08 Wei-Cheng Chang , Chun-Liang Li , Youssef Mroueh , Yiming Yang

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

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) refers to a class of methods for Bayesian inference based on interacting particle systems. In this paper, we consider the originally proposed deterministic dynamics as well as a stochastic variant,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-26 Nikolas Nüsken , D. R. Michiel Renger

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a general-purpose optimization-based sampling algorithm that has recently exploded in popularity, but is limited by two issues: it is known to produce biased samples, and it can be slow to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-20 Alex Leviyev , Joshua Chen , Yifei Wang , Omar Ghattas , Aaron Zimmerman

We present a new particle filtering algorithm for nonlinear systems in the discrete-time setting. Our algorithm is based on the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) framework, which is a general approach to sample from a target…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Jiaojiao Fan , Amirhossein Taghvaei , Yongxin Chen

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

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a deterministic particle inference algorithm that provides an efficient alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo. However, SVGD has been found to suffer from variance underestimation when the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-14 Xing Liu , Harrison Zhu , Jean-François Ton , George Wynne , Andrew Duncan

Stein variational gradient decent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful approximate inference algorithm for complex distributions. However, the standard SVGD requires calculating the gradient of the target density and cannot be applied…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-08 Jun Han , Qiang Liu

Sampling from an unnormalized target distribution is an essential problem with many applications in probabilistic inference. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful method that iteratively updates a set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Hoang Phan , Ngoc Tran , Trung Le , Toan Tran , Nhat Ho , Dinh Phung

We show how to use Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) to carry out inference in Gaussian process (GP) models with non-Gaussian likelihoods and large data volumes. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is extremely computationally intensive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-20 Thomas Pinder , Christopher Nemeth , David Leslie